


A Kissing Book (That Doesn't Sound Too Bad)

by VIII_XIII



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Princess Bride Fusion, Gift Exchange, M/M, Romance, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-18
Updated: 2015-02-18
Packaged: 2018-03-13 16:30:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3388529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VIII_XIII/pseuds/VIII_XIII
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing that a great many people don't understand about true love is that it doesn’t announce itself with fanfare, and it doesn't happen all at once. True love takes root in the crevices in a person’s being, a creeping thing that breaks two people apart and knits those pieces together again to make something stronger than the sum of its parts.</p><p>Adventure, intrigue, pirates, mercenaries, attempted murder, unspeakable grief, happy endings. A Princess Bride AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Kissing Book (That Doesn't Sound Too Bad)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [colliena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/colliena/gifts).



> For the Arthur/Eames Gift Exchange.

In the old days, in the kingdom of Morrow, there was a grand city that perched on a bluff between the Improbably High Mountains and the Impossibly Deep Sea. The city was ancient and shimmered white in the sun, and the hill that it sat on was so high and the castle at the crest of it had spires so tall that it could be seen more than a day's journey away. It could be seen from a little house on a little farm in a little village across the vast fields, from the north-facing bedroom window of the family's only son, who usually kept that shade drawn because the glare off the glorious city woke him up in the morning.

That was why the son, whose name was Arthur, did his work at a desk that sat under the window that faced south rather than north, away from the city and toward the yard and the stable and the fields. Arthur did not help with the chores, as the son of any other relatively prosperous farmer would. Arthur did not wish to stay in the village and marry and take over his parents’ farm. Arthur liked books and learning, and dreamed of crossing the Impossibly Deep Sea to the kingdom of Proclus, where there was a great university where odd, bookish people like Arthur traveled to be with kindred spirits and a great many more books than they could reasonably afford on their own.

And so Arthur spent his days in his room at his desk, and he studied letters and numbers, art and history, science and the farm boy who worked in the yard. The farm boy was not a necessary part of the knowledge needed to attend the great university across the sea; rather, he was a distraction. One that had been there a long time, but which Arthur only started to notice ever increasingly in the few years leading up to the time with which we are concerned, which is not terribly long after Arthur’s nineteenth birthday.

Arthur was indeed a bit of a late bloomer, but it was said in those parts at those times that the late blossom bloomed the most enthusiastically, and in Arthur’s case this was true. The long winter of that year turned to spring, and the farm boy stopped wearing his woolen hat and old, oversized coat and thick leather gloves and came to work with his shirtsleeves rolled up, and Arthur found it much more difficult to concentrate on his sums and regularly left large blots of ink all over his papers when he paused thoughtlessly and let his quill empty onto the page. Spring warmed and dried into summer, and the farm boy chopped wood for the kitchen stripped to the waist in the heat, and Arthur sat in his room with his quill forgotten in its inkwell, hunched over his desk and blushing furiously, as though he were a rather embarrassed predator lurking self-consciously in the shadows, starving but too insecure to pounce, or even to tell his prey that he looked delectable.

This was how Arthur’s days went. The farm boy came at sunrise and was there when Arthur sat down to his day’s studies, and he worked until the sun was low in the sky. And every evening, just when the sun began to sink behind the trees of the vast forest at the far end of the pastures, the farm boy came over to Arthur’s window, and Arthur ducked his head and began scribbling down words or numbers – usually nonsense – with a vengeance, and very studiously did not look at the farm boy. The farm boy did not seem to care that he was always so pointedly ignored, because every evening he leaned his very substantial forearms on the windowsill and said in his low, soft voice, “I’m done for the day. Is there anything you require of me?”

Invariably, Arthur answered – mumbled, really – “No, I’m fine,” to which the farm boy invariably replied, “As you wish.” Every day at this point, Arthur waited for the sound of farm boy’s footsteps moving away from the house, and only then did he look up and watch the farm boy’s perfect form retreating, and he hated himself for his behavior but did not know what else to do.

The farm boy's name was Eames. Arthur knew this, and he also knew some other things, for it was rather impossible to have someone spend six days a week outside one’s house, working for one’s parents, without learning something. Arthur knew that Eames was older than he was himself, but not by much, and he knew that Eames had no parents, though that had not been the case when he'd first come to work at the farm. He knew that Eames was popular in the town because the village was quite small and they saw each other sometimes on Sundays when they were both free, Eames always with people saying hello or trying to talk to him. But he also knew that Eames had no riches or family name and would not be considered a suitable match for many of the young townspeople who smiled and blushed at him whenever he walked through the market square.

Arthur knew, for that matter, that Eames would not be a suitable match for him. Not because of the opinion of Arthur's parents (for they were fair-minded people who cared more for Arthur's happiness than wealth or prestige) but because Arthur couldn't compare to Eames in any of the ways that mattered. Yes, Arthur was intelligent, but Eames was known to be intelligent too, even if he didn't have much in the way of education and could neither read nor write. And compared to Eames, Arthur was too skinny, too shy, and too awkward. He was passable looking, he supposed, but Eames was beautiful. Eames was perfect. It almost hurt to look at him.

That was the thought that crossed Arthur's mind when Eames came to his window as the latest in a long string of days dwindled, on the evening when he finally managed to startle Arthur into looking up at him. Arthur stared as Eames leaned on the sill with his dirty blond hair lit up by the last of the day's sun, his grey eyes wide and expectant. “I’m sorry, what?” Arthur asked, unable to think very well at all, much less of something clever to say. He was aware of his quill dripping onto his work, and yet he stayed perfectly still.

“I said,” Eames said, “’is there anything you require of me, darling?’”

The blush that crept over Arthur’s face started from the tips of his ears and blossomed along his cheekbones, then finally over the bridge of his nose. The endearment was new, and Arthur didn't understand it. He watched as Eames’s eyes narrowed in amusement, his lips forming the slightest smile, and Arthur's temperature rose along with his embarrassment. He looked away quickly, down at his geometry work, and saw that he’d ruined yet another equation by letting his ink run all over it. It felt, just then, like the least of his problems.

“Why do you make fun of me? I’ve never done anything to you,” he muttered, and he waited for Eames to say something biting, something that would break his heart, but nothing came except silence. Finally, confused, Arthur looked back up from under his eyelashes and found Eames just staring at him, head cocked slightly and eyebrows furrowed. He wasn't smiling anymore.

“Is that what you think? That I’m making fun of you?”

“Why else would you call me that? And why else would you come here every day and ask me if I require anything? You don’t work for me. Maybe you don’t like me because I don’t work on the farm, but I’ve never asked a single thing of you, and I don’t think it’s fair that—”

“Arthur.”

Immediately, Arthur stopped talking. It was the first time Eames had ever used his name; it was very nearly a shock to him that Eames even knew what it was, though of course it would have been absurd to think that he wouldn’t.

“Arthur,” Eames said again, more softly this time, and his tongue darted out to wet his lips. For the first time Arthur could remember, Eames looked self-conscious in some way. “Didn’t it ever occur to you that maybe I come here every day and ask if you require anything of me because I want you to require something of me? Anything of me?”

It was impossible not to take his meaning. Arthur’s breath suddenly sounded very ragged in his own ears, and his heartbeat felt troubling, too heavy and too quick by a sight. His fingers tightened on his quill, and he heard the snap of the tip of it breaking against his paper, and he didn’t care at all. “I… didn’t… do you mean that?” he asked, his voice embarrassingly weak, and Eames opened his mouth to reply, but just then Arthur’s father’s voice called from across the yard, obviously hoping to speak to Eames before he left for the day, and Eames’s face crumpled a bit.

“Think on it,” he said, and he did an odd little indecisive hop, as though he wanted to do something before he left but could not think of anything to do, and then he ducked back under the open shutters and was gone.

Arthur did think on it. He thought on it for hours after that, all through dinner and distracted by it to the point that he soon claimed to feel a bit unwell and retired early. He went to his room with the full intention of washing up and attempting to sleep, but he realized quickly that he was too restless for that. And so he climbed out that same window where Eames came to speak to him, not because he was not allowed to leave at night – for Arthur was certainly old enough to do as he liked, and perhaps it would have made his parents feel a bit better to know that their son cared about something other than books enough to go off to untold parts in the darkness in search of that thing – but because he was simply too embarrassed to tell anyone he was leaving, and it seemed much more painless to simply slink off across the yard.

Arthur had never actually visited Eames's home, but he knew where he lived, for it was not ten minutes down the lane that ran the northern perimeter of the village. It was a small cottage, but pleasant and well cared-for, though Arthur noticed each time he passed that the herbs and wildflowers in the front garden had gotten rather out of hand since Eames's mother's passing. Now, as far as Arthur knew, Eames lived alone, and he certainly hoped that that was the case because he would feel quite foolish showing up in the dark unannounced if someone else answered the door.

But when he knocked – which only happened after several minutes standing in the front garden second-guessing himself and working up the nerve to go to the front door – it was Eames who answered, and it seemed to take him a moment to register that it was Arthur standing there. Before he could even get past the surprise and say anything, Arthur blurted out, “I hope I'm not interrupting anything.”

Eames glanced around himself, as though trying to imagine what Arthur might be interrupting. “Such as what?” he asked, and Arthur could see, even in the dim glow from the hearth inside, that he'd caught Eames off-guard, flustered him. His usual confidence seemed slow in returning.

“Maybe you have guests,” Arthur said in a voice that was far more breathless than such a statement deserved.

“I don't, but if I did, I'd tell them they had to leave.”

The absolute seriousness and conviction in Eames's voice when he said that was thrilling, in its own strange way, in its ridiculousness and its implication. Arthur had never quite realized, until that moment, that he and Eames were nearly of a height, and that made it simple for Arthur to step forward, not quite into the house but very close to Eames, and lean in, and kiss him.

There were, in those days – and among some people even today – certain things that everyone knew about true love. They knew that true love involved lots of mostly closed-mouth kissing with the wind blowing through one's hair, which went on for a short time, and then there was a big wedding that the entire village came to, and then one party carried the other party off and over some sort of threshold, whatever type was available, and then there was love-making, which in this case was a very particular type of intercourse where a lot of clothes remained on and the parties involved were very quiet and spent a lot of time looking into one another's eyes. If the people involved possessed the correct combination of parts for it, usually an angelic little perfectly-behaved infant followed shortly thereafter.

Arthur thought that all of that was stupid, and as far as he was concerned, if those things were a requirement for true love, he wanted some other sort of love. Fortunately for him, people in those days had – as some people have even today – a great many strange misconceptions about a great many things, and in reality, true love was as varied and unique as the people who stumbled into it. In this case, true love was a first kiss that was shy and breathless and awkward for all it was wonderful, and when Arthur pulled back, he murmured, “Is this all right?”

“I told you I wanted you to require _anything_ ,” Eames replied.

“And what if I require everything?” Arthur asked, and Eames only smiled and pulled him into the house, shutting the door as he did.

“All the better.”

True love, most people thought, waited. For what, it wasn't always clear, and in reality waiting was rarely a practical sort of expectation to begin with. Arthur was young, and he was entirely new to this, and he had wanted Eames from afar – or at least from across the yard – for so long that he was entirely unwilling to wait any longer than Eames asked him to and did not see the point in pretending otherwise. In his case true love turned out to be, in its earliest stages, more physical than the storybooks suggest. Long, exploratory kisses turned to shorter, more demanding ones, and they'd barely even made it inside, and so it was at about the time that hands started to wander below beltlines that Arthur murmured, “Can we sit down?”

One of Eames's eyebrows crept up, and he seemed rather dazed as he asked, “What, in a chair?”

Arthur's eyelids lowered a bit. He had not thought he would have to be blunt or pushy, because Eames was older and Eames was beautiful and surely Eames was experienced, though Arthur didn’t ask. He didn't believe in picturesque trysts under the light of the full moon, but he'd still somewhat expected to be swept off his feet, if only because Eames was about twice his size and had biceps as thick as Arthur's thighs. “On your bed,” he said, fixing Eames with a look of the utmost seriousness.

Eames's voice was a bit strained when he asked, “Are you sure?”

“Eames,” Arthur said, “I'd like to pretend that I climbed out my bedroom window and came to your home in the dead of night with only the purest of intentions, but I don't think it's a good idea to build a relationship on dishonesty. If you're not ready for that, it's all right, but—”

Suddenly, Eames took Arthur by the hips and yanked him forward, and Arthur was made rather unavoidably aware of the press of Eames's half-hard cock through the fabric of his trousers. His eyes widened, his lips parted, and a little sound of desire somewhere between a gasp and a moan escaped before Arthur could stop it. Embarrassed, he quickly added, “You feel ready.”

“Yes,” Eames replied, and Arthur _was_ swept off his feet then, but not in a particularly romantic way; it was only long enough for him to be deposited on the bed in the corner of the room, and then Eames was over him but not quite on top of him, his elbows bracketing Arthur's head and his knees Arthur's hips, but their bodies not quite touching. Eames watched him for a second, as though making sure that Arthur was still comfortable, and Arthur steadily met his gaze.

When Eames kissed him, it was hard and open-mouthed, still an unfamiliar but eminently exciting experience for Arthur, who writhed against the bed, wishing that Eames would set a bit of his weight down on him. Eames didn't, and in turn Arthur couldn't quite find the nerve to reach up and pull him down, and he wondered vaguely why he felt the need to be as careful with Eames as Eames was being with him.

He wondered this as he toed off his own boots and kicked them to the floor, and as he tugged open the laces of his own breeches and freed the hem of his shirt. Eames broke the kiss, and looked down between their bodies at the strained front of Arthur's trousers, at the loosened closure that threatened to expose him if only nudged in the right direction, at the way Arthur's stomach was partially exposed, Arthur's fingers still wrapped around the fabric of his shirt. Self-consciousness set in, and Arthur paused in his movements and waited for Eames to react.

“Oh, darling,” Eames murmured after a moment, reaching down to run a broad, callused hand over the sharp delineation of Arthur's hipbone. Arthur arched up into the touch, but then Eames sat up and Arthur (though he didn't know it) fell a little bit further in love with Eames when instead of undressing Arthur further, he chose to undress himself. He pulled his thin, threadbare shirt off all at once, then worked open his trousers. He took Arthur's hands and guided them to the waistband. Arthur helped work them down over his ass and found himself transfixed as Eames's cock, thick and heavy with arousal, was exposed, but he wasn't so completely distracted that he couldn’t help Eames crawl out of the remainder of his clothing.

Only that afternoon, Arthur had been convinced that Eames barely even noticed him, and now he had Eames naked on top of him, and he might have thought that it was a dream if Eames weren't so solid and so blisteringly hot when Arthur reached up and ran his hands up his chest and over muscular shoulders to his neck. “God, you're perfect,” he whispered.

“ _I'm_ perfect?” Eames said, his voice utterly amused, and he reached down to push Arthur's shirt up further, hiking it up over his chest so that his hands could find Arthur's nipples. “Says the most beautiful person in the village, who's completely untouchable and so wrapped up in his own brilliant thoughts he doesn't even notice the way everyone looks at him.”

Arthur would have thought Eames was teasing, but there was something so matter-of-fact in his voice that there could be no doubt of his sincerity. Arthur didn't know that what he said was true – he really thought that it couldn't possibly be – but he knew that Eames certainly thought that it was, and that was what counted.

The thing that a great many people don't understand about true love is that it doesn’t announce itself with fanfare, and it doesn't happen all at once. True love takes root in the crevices in a person’s being, a creeping thing that breaks two people apart and knits those pieces together again to make something stronger than the sum of its parts.

The things that Arthur remembered later about that first night were sensory: rough hands and smooth shoulders, the breadth of Eames's thick waist between his spread thighs, the feel of Eames's nails digging into his hips as he pulled Arthur down on top of him. He remembered hot breaths, the dwindling light of the fire in the hearth, and the way Eames's face looked when Arthur wrapped his hand around both their erections and rocked his hips long and slow until he found exactly the right angle. But what he couldn't remember, because he couldn't even feel it happening, was the little seed that took hold in his heart and began to grow.

Maybe that night they were only two people subject to the infatuations and fits of hormonal fervor so tragically common amongst the young, and when they awoke Eames only walked Arthur home through the dew-soaked meadows in the twilight before the sun rose and lifted him through his bedroom window and kissed him goodbye about a dozen times, through smiles and muffled laughter, because it was the morning after and they were both drunk off of having something they'd pined after for so long. Then again, maybe not. Does it matter? Some would say it does, but those people are welcome to write their own stories.

In this story, what mattered was the long summer that followed, when Arthur waited for Eames at the gate every morning that he didn't awaken in Eames's bed, and carried his books with him and sat on the stump in the yard or atop one of the gates in the stables and read to Eames while he worked. What mattered were kisses behind the barn, when Arthur would crowd in close regardless of what Eames had been doing all morning and end up with dusty handprints and dirt smudges all over his once-pressed and pristine shirts. What mattered were the nights that were so warm and dry they met out in the meadows in private little rooms with high grass walls and roofs of stars and fireflies, talking until they fell silent and just floated on the steady sound of one another's breaths.

What mattered was the day Eames arrived for work, and for no particular reason to Arthur it was like seeing him for the first time all over again. He spent the whole day distracted, becoming flustered when Eames would ask if he was all right. After Eames left for the evening, Arthur didn't wait for nightfall but instead just ran off through the fields until he reached Eames's cottage, pounded on the door, and breathlessly declared the moment Eames opened it, “I love you.”

For a moment, Eames simply blinked at him in surprise, but then a grin crept slowly over his face. “Arthur, darling, is that what’s been wrong with you today?”

“I wanted to tell you.”

“But you were afraid to?”

Arthur knew that he was pouting a bit at the accusation, but he pretended he wasn’t, lifted his chin, and said, “I was waiting for the right moment. It never came. I didn’t want to wait all night.”

And at that, Eames laughed lowly, and he reached out and hooked his fingers into the waistband of Arthur’s breeches, and he tugged him into the cottage much the same as he did each time Arthur came to his door, and with the door shut he stepped close, and nuzzled into Arthur’s neck, and murmured, “I love you more each day, Arthur. Each moment. I love you more now than I did when you knocked on the door.”

Smiling despite himself, Arthur huffed a bit and asked, “Do you have to be so sappy?”

Eames lifted his head, coming so close to kissing Arthur that their noses brushed together, but he simply looked at him through half-lidded eyes alight with amusement and replied, “I do. Absolutely.”

“Well. I suppose I’ll learn to live with it someday,” Arthur said airily, and at that, Eames’s eyes narrowed even further in mock offense, and the next thing Arthur knew he was being tossed over Eames’s shoulder unceremoniously only to be deposited with a bounce and a little yelp on the bed just a few steps away.

“I hope you weren’t planning on just running off to some other engagement after delivering your message,” Eames rumbled as he stripped off his shirt in one smooth motion, and Arthur felt his cock give a little jump as he laid there, leaning on his elbows and still a bit dazed.

“I, uh,” he said as Eames pulled open the laces of his trousers, and he added, “Um,” when Eames shoved them down, and off, and crawled onto Arthur fully stripped. Quite belatedly he remembered what Eames had actually said, and he added rather stupidly, “No.”

“Good,” Eames said, and he set to work on Arthur’s trousers, his fingers working as efficiently at getting them open as Arthur’s cock was at hardening. Once Eames had it free, he didn’t continue to pull Arthur’s clothes off. Rather, he went straight for the little phial of oil a rather self-conscious Arthur had bought at the market and which Eames kept tucked between his pillow and the wall. Arthur let out a sort of high pitched, helpless sound at the realization that Eames was intent on wasting no time.

Eames rode him like that, exposed and shameless atop Arthur while Arthur was still fully dressed down to his boots, rolling his hips in torturously slow passes, his fingers twined with Arthur’s and pressing his hands down over his head. It was, perhaps, for the best that Eames worked to draw it out, because Arthur couldn’t remember ever having been so utterly aroused and close to the edge so quickly. His breaths and quiet moans came sharp and fast, his hands squeezing Eames’s with each subsequent wave of pleasure, his body arching and doing its best to chase Eames every time he lifted his hips. Eames, in contrast, drew deep breaths in time with his own movements, half-smiling serenely down at Arthur as though his erection weren’t dripping fluid all over Arthur’s stomach where Eames had carefully pushed his shirt out of the way.

Arthur couldn’t put into words the message that Eames was sending him with this. But he felt it, in his bones and to his very core; he understood, and the revelation was almost overwhelming. True love is not perfect; it’s two people who belong together doing their best. But sometimes those two people meet at exactly the right time in exactly the right way, and things pass between them that could never be articulated or explained, and those rare moments are perfect. This was one of them.

When Arthur climaxed, Eames’s name was a sob torn from him.

Later, when they laid in bed together, wrapped up in Eames’s quilts and each other, Eames murmured, “You’re going to Proclus next year. To the university.”

The two of them had discussed it, but never in concrete terms, and Arthur’s stomach sank a bit then. “I had meant to…”

“You are,” Eames said firmly, and he sat up, leaning over Arthur on one elbow. “And I’m going to come with you.” Arthur’s eyes widened and his heart picked up a bit, but when he opened his mouth to reply, Eames interrupted. “But I’m not going empty-handed. I refuse to have nothing to offer you.”

“You have everything to offer me.”

“We both know that isn’t true,” Eames told him, but Arthur didn’t know, not in his heart. Eames continued, “There’s a merchant vessel leaving next month, to sail the perimeter routes of the Impossibly Deep Sea. I heard about it in town, from a man who passed through on his way to the port, and he says they need strong hands. It’s a good opportunity; I can earn some money, and next year it will dock in Proclus, and I’ll be able to join you.”

Arthur wanted to reply, but he found himself speechless. Perhaps the complete loss of words was a symptom of a heart breaking. He sat up, shaking his head in disbelief, and Eames sat up after him and tried to put an arm around him, but Arthur pulled away. “Darling,” Eames said, but Arthur cut him off.

“Were you ever going to ask me what I want? If I have to choose between being here with you and being in Proclus alone, then I’m not going, Eames!”

“Arthur, it’s not forever. It’s only a year,” Eames insisted.

Arthur scowled and waved a hand derisively. “Yes, a year when you’ll be off on some ship with who knows who, sailing off to who knows where, getting up to who knows what!”

In response to that, Eames raised one eyebrow; he didn’t have to do any more to convey how utterly unimpressed he was. “Is that really what you’re worried about?”

Arthur didn’t need to respond; the way his expression crumpled and simply let himself fall forward into his own lap, hiding his face in the quilts, said it all. He felt stupid and childish, but he was young, and he hadn’t been very childish even as a child, and we all sometimes deserve our moments of petulance.

But then Eames’s arms were around him, pulling him upright and holding him against his chest. His words were soft and hot against Arthur’s neck when he murmured, “I promise I will come back to you.”

“You can’t promise that,” Arthur replied. His words were hollow, but Eames was so self-assured in his response, Arthur nearly believed him on his strength of conviction alone.

“This is true love. There is nothing in this world that could keep us apart.”

Arthur gave in; in truth, he had little choice but to do so, but nevertheless he made peace with the situation as best he could. Eames packed a small bag and sold his family’s cottage (“I didn’t need all that space anyhow,” he said of the single room), and when the time came for him to travel to the great port city two days’ ride to the west, Arthur accompanied him.

“Marry me before I leave,” Eames said, quite suddenly, the night that they arrived at the coast, and it was simultaneously the most wonderful and the most heartbreaking thing that anyone had ever said to Arthur.

Eames bought rings, simple and inexpensive, with some of the money he’d received for his home, and he married Arthur in the town courthouse. Arthur spent his last day with Eames with that little silver band weighing heavy on his hand, his thumb constantly seeking it out, nervously turning it about his finger until it began to wear the skin raw. When Eames went to the docks on the second morning, Arthur said one last time, “I’ll come with you.”

“I won’t let my own shortcomings delay your dream, Arthur,” Eames said, as he had said each time before, and there was no arguing.

Having kissed him and held him as long as he could, Arthur watched Eames traverse the swaying gangplank, his pack slung over one shoulder. They’d said their goodbyes, but he still called after him, “I’ll wait for you!”

And there had never been any doubt of that, but Eames still looked back at him, and smiled radiantly, and replied, “I’ll see you in Proclus. Sooner than you know, darling.” And then he was gone, and Arthur stood there, hardly feeling the wind or smelling the salt air, watching the ship disappear from the harbor. When he finally turned from the expanse of the blue sea to the gleaming white houses and winding streets of the port, he didn’t cry. He felt the tears coming, and he screwed up his face and marshalled his own breath.

“This is true love,” he said to himself. It was something that Eames always said and that Arthur had always thought silly. Now, though, he needed to believe it.

Arthur returned home. He studied, but he also helped his parents while they trained their new hand – a farm girl, this time, who was taller and stronger than Arthur and quite serious, and whom Arthur liked largely because she was nothing like Eames. He did his best to be happy, but Eames’s absence was a stone in his chest that dragged him down with every step.

“It will get easier with time,” his mother said, and Arthur pretended that it did for her sake, but it didn’t. Months passed, and the weight that Arthur carried didn’t lessen at all. When the seasons had turned and the winds shifted and the best time for departure of ships bound for the kingdom of Proclus neared, Arthur packed his things and said goodbye to his parents, and he set off once more for the port. It was the first thing that had truly lifted his spirits since the day Eames left; Proclus was where Eames would find him. Going there had always been his dream, but Arthur saw it then as a step that would bring him that much closer to the day Eames came home.

The day that Arthur arrived in the port, however, was the same day that news reached the town of the loss of the merchant ship _Cobol_. “Three months past, off the coast of Lyonesse,” said the old sailor who arrived at the inn where Arthur was staying. “Ambushed by the Dread Pirate Charles.”

Arthur’s blood ran cold in that moment. He knew little of sailing and even less of the often peculiar lore of those who lived their lives on the sea, but everyone in the lands between the sea and the mountains knew of the Dread Pirate Charles. Everyone knew of his heartlessness and cruelty. Everyone knew that he took no prisoners.

The entire tavern started as Arthur dropped his spoon and it clattered off the edge of his bowl, then off of the worn wooden table and onto the floor. They watched as he nearly knocked his chair over and moved for the nearest exit, which led to the back alley. Arthur barely managed to get outside before he vomited, and he himself was unaware of when, exactly, being ill turned to helpless sobbing as he knelt there on the cold, broken cobblestones.

Grief is not romantic. It is an ugly, horrible thing, the kind of thing that is too upsetting for most people even to witness. Arthur locked himself away from the world, in his room on the top floor of the inn, and for days he ate nothing and slept nearly as little. He screamed into his pillows, pulled at his own hair, curled up and cried until the painful tension in every muscle of his body left him trembling uncontrollably. When the misery gave out, there was a boiling anger – at the Dread Pirate Charles, at the Fates, at himself for not being there, at Eames for leaving him – that bubbled up to take its place, until despair grew again and the anger subsided, and the cycle started once more.

He saw, a thousand times, every time he closed his eyes, Eames dying alone. Each time he did, he died a little bit more himself.

Those days left him pale and weak, and his whole body felt drawn and tight, as though his very self were two sizes too small. But in the end, he did emerge from his room, and he paid the innkeeper and left. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but it only took one look at the docks – and the violent wave of nausea even the sight of them induced – for Arthur to know beyond a doubt that he was not going to Proclus, and he never would.

So he set off in the other direction, away from the town. He couldn’t go home. He couldn’t face anyone he knew, be forced to speak what had happened to those who would share his grief. For the time being, he needed to bottle it up and keep it his own. Maybe he would take vows with some religious order and live up in the mountains. Maybe he would go to the capital and pledge his service to the king and be sent to some far off land to die in battle. The only thing he knew for certain was that he would never love again.

As it so happened, Arthur never made it to the capital, or to the mountains where the cloistered monasteries sat nestled high in the peaks, at least not while he traveled alone. He walked for some time, from village to village, sleeping outside when the weather was favorable and at inns when it wasn’t, using up the money he’d brought to purchase passage over the sea. He lost track of the days but cared little. He felt like a ghost, someone no one knew and no one noticed upon arrival or departure, and he liked that as well as he could like anything. At least the next village along the road was always a goal, however meaningless. It was something he could focus on.

But soon the season was changing, and the winds along with it, and they brought with them unpredictable storms. Arthur was several miles from the nearest village when a squall came up from the south. The wind picked up first, and the already grey skies darkened, and although Arthur had decided that he was not entirely indisposed to the thought of death, it occurred to him that being caught in a torrential rainstorm, becoming hopelessly lost while searching for shelter, and dying of exposure or an unfortunate encounter with the local wildlife in the night was not one of his preferred methods of departure.

The likelihood of exactly that happening, however, seemed to grow by the second as the skies opened up and the rain poured down – or rather, sideways, for the most part, in sheets so thick and driving so brutally that in addition to being immediately soaked to the bone, Arthur could barely see the road ahead of him. “Damn,” he muttered, and it was a word that he repeated to himself as he trudged on more out of sheer stubbornness than hope of actually reaching his destination, growing colder by the minute, his hood and cloak pulled tight but ineffectually around him.

And indeed, he didn’t reach his destination, but he also did not die lost in the forest that night, as that would make for a very disappointing story indeed. Instead, Arthur became aware of the sound of a galloping horse over the din of the downpour only moments before the rider overtook him, swinging around and reaching out a hand as he stopped straight in Arthur’s path. “Get on!” called the man, who was likewise bundled tight, but in a cloak of much finer make than Arthur’s own.

Arthur had always been told, as every child learned in those days, never to get on a horse with a stranger. However, there are times in life when no potential stranger could ever be worse than the situation itself, and this was certainly one of those times.

“You’re the Crown Prince,” Arthur said less than an hour later. They were in a room at a roadside inn; Arthur had changed into the least soaked clothing from his pack, wrapped himself in a blanket from the bed, and huddled up on the rug in front of the hearth. He was watching the stranger – the Crown Prince – with some amount of incredulity.

The prince paused in attempting to scrub his hair dry with a threadbare towel and looked at Arthur in some surprise. Arthur nodded his head a bit, toward the chair where the prince had thrown most of his own wet clothing. “I’ve seen the crest with the bird on your sword hilt before, in a history of the royal family.”

“A kingfisher,” the prince sighed, and he nodded. “You’re very observant.”

“So you’re either the Crown Prince, or a vagabond who killed the Crown Prince and stole his sword and clothes.”

The prince laughed softly as he moved to sit down opposite Arthur on the rug. “Nothing so exciting as that. I’m just the prince, though I suppose that must seem rather unlikely to you.”

“Yes,” Arthur said. “But I don’t dismiss things merely because they’re unlikely.” He looked at the prince evenly, and the prince stared back, his expression shifting subtly as though he were thinking about something Arthur could not guess at. At last Arthur said, “But if you’re the Crown Prince, why are you this far from the capital, alone, traveling in a downpour and wearing clothing no better than that of a wealthy merchant?”

The prince was (as princes generally were in those days) very beautiful, but beautiful in the way that a marble statue in a city square was beautiful – sharp and untouchable. And so it was a bit odd to see him blush and scratch at the back of his neck, as though he were embarrassed by the question. “Well,” he said, “that would be because my father is demanding that I be married.”

“So you’re running away from your wedding.”

The prince huffed a humorless little laugh. “Not exactly. My father wants to use me to form a political alliance. I don’t know with whom yet, but I’ve met most of the neighboring royal families and none of the prospects are very good, or at least not from my point of view. But under the law, I have the right to choose my own match. If I can find someone on my own to marry me, he’ll have to accept it.”

Arthur wondered if the prince were perhaps a bit dim. “Do you think there’s a shortage of people willing to marry the crown prince in this kingdom?”

“It’s not about willingness.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No!” the prince exclaimed. “Of course not! It’s about true love.”

Those words cut into Arthur, reopening wounds that had only barely begun to be sutured shut. There was the pain that flowed forth, but more than that there was bitterness, and it came through in his voice when he snapped, “And so you rode off into the countryside hoping that fate would just put it right in front of you, is that it? You think that true love is something that happens when noble young men find farmers’ sons caught in a rainstorm and whisk them off to shelter and safety? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s not. My true love and I were together for a summer – one summer – before he was killed at sea. True love doesn’t just happen, and in my opinion, you should hope that it doesn’t happen to you.”

The prince stared at Arthur with wide eyes, clearly shocked by the outburst, and only then did Arthur think that perhaps he’d been unnecessarily harsh. His heart was broken, but he didn’t have to be cruel to a man who was clearly in a difficult position himself. He drew a few deep, slow breaths, and he said much more softly, “I’m sorry, your highness.”

“My name is Robert,” the prince said immediately. “And don’t be. I’m sorry; if I had known, I never would have, ah—”

“Stopped to help me?”

“Brought up such a painful topic,” Robert replied sharply, clearly affronted by the idea that he might have left Arthur out in the forest to fend for himself. Somehow, the reaction got Arthur to smile just the slightest bit. Robert sighed quietly. “In any case, I’m on my way back to the capital. I’ve realized that I could certainly find someone who would marry me for my title, but would that really be any different from being married off for political reasons? I would still be tied to someone I didn’t love and still be going through the motions of fulfilling my marital obligations. I may as well let my father do the choosing for me, in that case, instead of choosing on my own the person who’ll be doomed to an unhappy life with me.”

That night, after the exhaustion of the day’s events, Arthur slept better than he had in a very long time – not deeply, or peacefully, but at least mostly through the night. In the morning he helped Robert saddle up his horse, lost in his own thoughts through most of the process. He nearly missed it when Robert took the reins from him and said, “Thank you, Arthur. I suppose this is goodbye; I wish you all the best, though I know that must mean very little given your situation.”

“Ah,” Arthur said, stepping back to allow Robert to climb into the saddle. He was staring rather stupidly, but only because he was thinking quite hard about what Robert had said the previous day, and both their situations.

“Wait,” he added, and Robert did, looking down at him with a raised eyebrow. Arthur took a deep breath, fiddling restlessly with the wedding band on his left hand. “I can never love again, nor do I want to. I can’t even say I wouldn’t welcome death; I would greet it with open arms. But if I can do something worthwhile in the meantime, I will. If a spouse who will desire absolutely nothing of you and would rather be left to his own devices would be preferable to you than an arranged marriage, I could provide that.”

Robert’s eyebrows shot up. “What? Really?”

Arthur shrugged one shoulder. He felt oddly calm about making the offer, and that was when he realized how truly dead he already was inside. “I was considering joining a holy order. The celibacy and access to a library appeal to me. If you can offer me those two things, that’s all I require.”

For a long moment, Robert looked at Arthur in consideration. “I suppose,” he said at last, “that a loveless marriage and a series of illicit affairs was always a more reasonable expectation than finding my perfect match.”

“How illicit is an affair, really, if your spouse doesn’t care?”

After a moment’s thought, Robert smiled wryly, and offered Arthur a hand up.

In the capital, everything changed, and not entirely for the better. Arthur didn’t mind, because even a change for the worse was a distraction, and a distraction was the best he could hope for.

He was welcomed by the people of the capital with open arms; he hadn’t given much thought to how the kingdom would receive him, but when he was presented to them on the day that the impending wedding was announced, the cheers were deafening.

“They don’t even know me,” Arthur said to Robert afterward.

“You’re a commoner, and you’re beautiful. That’s enough for them to approve of you.”

“No one thinks I’m beautiful,” Arthur muttered; in his head, only Eames had ever thought that, and Eames was gone. Arthur was just Arthur now.

Robert didn’t seem to know what to say to that.

The royal family’s retainers also took an immediate liking to Arthur. Certainly, he was rather serious and even sullen at times, but he treated them as equals because he’d been born their equal and was incapable of seeing himself as anything but, and so they approved greatly of the prince’s choice. Although Arthur preferred to be left alone in the castle’s library – which was everything he’d been hoping it would be and quite a lot more – some of the most pleasant times he spent in the weeks between meeting Robert and the scheduled date of their wedding were those in which the castle staff came to his rooms to prepare him for one event or another leading up to the main one. For those hours, he could talk if he wanted but wasn’t expected to if he didn’t, and more importantly, he knew that no one would show up and ask him to come meet some awful diplomat or partake in some ridiculous palace function.

“I never realized how much work it takes to be able to show one’s face in public,” he said one day, dryly, to the woman who’d shown up to shape his fingernails and polish them until they gleamed. She glanced up at him, lips quirked in amusement. In the past days Arthur had been fitted for three different sets of fine silk and velvet clothing, had his face covered in some muddy substance and left to sit for reasons he still didn’t quite understand, and gotten a haircut.

“We’re just going to tame these curls a bit,” the barber had said to him.

“No. Take them off,” Arthur had replied, and the barber had argued, but in the end Arthur had his way, and his hair cut short and neat. The change made him look much older, which he liked, because it matched how he felt inside.

Not everyone received Arthur so well. The king hated him, which Arthur did not at all mind, because the king seemed foul-tempered and awful, and Arthur preferred to be disliked by such men. Most of his ire was taken out on Robert behind closed doors, and while Arthur certainly sympathized, he knew that it would have been the same no matter whom Robert had brought back with him, and so Arthur wasn’t about to feel any personal guilt about it.

The king’s advisors didn’t take to him much better – particularly not his chief of council, whose name was Browning and who stared at him with narrowed eyes and pursed lips every time they were forced to be around each other – but fortunately, Arthur didn’t have to see them often, and almost never outside of larger functions at which they had to treat him with some appearance of respect.

And really, none of it mattered. Arthur was unhappy, and that hardly hinged on whether or not the king liked him. He went through his days numb, feeling completely detached from everything he pretended to be to meet people’s expectations. In public, it was as though Arthur were merely watching himself perform a play. And at night, when he retired to his own room and locked the door, he curled up in bed with the heavy blankets and silk sheets pulled up over his head, and he came back to himself. On better nights he would cry quietly until he fell asleep, and on worse ones he would bury his face in his pillow, and a stark terror would come over him. Breathing became difficult, his heart pounded in his chest so hard he thought it would burst, and his future stretched out before him, long and dark, a void with no hope of finding light.

At this juncture (or any, really), one might question whether the loss of true love, as unspeakably awful as such a thing certainly is, really leaves a person without hope. Were Arthur’s prospects in those days as unchangeable and bleak as he believed, or was Arthur simply not far enough removed from the tragedy? Is it possible to move on, and to genuinely heal?

This is, of course, an unanswerable question. There have been countless broken hearts in the world, and countless people who had to press on with things. Every story is different; every story is its own. It would be unwise to look to any one of them as a model, an ideal, or a reflection of the way things “are”. The way Arthur felt in those days was merely the way he felt, and the only way he knew how feel in the situation. How his despair would have changed in the weeks and months and the lonely years that followed mattered little to him then, and it matters little to us, for circumstances have a way of changing, sometimes in rather dramatic fashion. They changed then.

The night before the wedding was one on which Arthur could not manage to fall asleep. Even after the tears were gone and he was completely worn out, he laid there in the dark miserable, exhausted, and frustrated. That was why when there was a sound outside his window well past midnight, and then another sound, and then a sound at the window, he heard them. And that was why, when the lock was quietly disengaged, the window was pulled open, and a shadowy figure climbed through it, Arthur was waiting with the first heavy object he’d been able to find.

He smashed an elaborate porcelain washbasin over the intruder’s head, and the intruder collapsed to the floor with a pained grunt. Arthur’s impromptu defensive measures worked brilliantly up until that point, but unfortunately he’d only had one washbasin, and now a second figure came through the window much less quietly than the first. “Well, shit,” she said. “He’s gone and gotten himself knocked unconscious.”

“Of course, great,” grunted a third person, still working his way up to the window ledge. While this was going on, Arthur was considering his options, and with not one but two more strangers to contend with and a number of guards presumably within shouting distance, he made a break for the door, yelling.

But he barely got anywhere, and he barely shouted anything, because in a moment the woman was on him, one arm tight around his neck and her other hand pressing a cloth tight over his mouth. The cloth was damp and smelled odd, sickly sweet like flowers and earthy like the air after a summer storm, and almost immediately Arthur’s limited vision swam.

The last thing he heard as he collapsed to his knees and lost his vision was, “Hey, this stuff works pretty well, Yusuf.”

Two days later Dominic Cobb, Licensed Mercenary, was a very frustrated man, and not only because he still quite hadn’t gotten the swelling on the side of his head to go down.

It is a known fact that most people are not what we might call “naturals” at anything. Brilliant philosophers, virtuoso musicians, and cunning linguists all require years of diligent study and practice to attain mastery in their fields. Useful skills rarely come easy. But Arthur, as it turned out, was both exceptional and fortunate in that he did have an inherent knack for something, and that something was escape. Before his kidnapping, he’d never had to escape from anything in his life, but upon finding himself bound and carted off into the eastern wilds, over hill and vale, he began trying to figure out how to do just that.

And he succeeded. Three times, in fact: once by working his rather slender hands free of their binding, once by cutting himself free with a bit of sharp rock, and once by not freeing his hands at all but rather taking an opportunity to merely roll away from a spot where they stopped to rest and off down an extremely steep hill.

But in a cruel bit of irony, although fate had gifted Arthur with a knack for escape, it had not gifted him with a matching knack for not being caught. He was apprehended fairly quickly the first two times. The third time there was really no chance of making it anywhere, but he rolled down the hill anyway because he was a man with little regard for his own life and an understandable desire to make his captors’ lives as annoying as possible. He smiled for the first time in days as they carted him all the way back out of the ravine.

“This is inconceivable,” Cobb – who was, for better or for worse, the leader of the operation – sighed as Yusuf rather unceremoniously unloaded Arthur onto the ground back at the top of the hill.

“That may have been true the first time,” Yusuf said, out of breath and sounding just as annoyed as Arthur had hoped.

The woman, Ariadne, knelt down to check Arthur’s bindings and make sure they hadn’t loosened in the fall – but only after she quickly ascertained that Arthur himself had not been damaged in the fall – and she added, “At this juncture, I would say that inconceivable is more or less the opposite of what this is, which is completely predictable.”

“I didn’t ask for either of your opinions.”

In his time traveling with his rather odd group of kidnappers, Arthur had rather gotten the impression that this Cobb person was, while undoubtedly in charge, perhaps not the most capable member of the party. His apparent lackeys, Ariadne and Yusuf, seemed to do most of the work. He’d managed to ascertain from conversation that Ariadne was an illusionist of some sort, and Yusuf seemed to be an alchemist. Arthur was still a curious and knowledge-hungry sort, and despite his general irritation at having been kidnapped, he would have liked to talk to them about their respective fields, except that every time he asked a question, Cobb would turn around and snap, “No consorting with the prisoner.”

“We’re already consorting; we have been for two days. Do you mean no conversing?” Ariadne had asked at last.

And then Arthur had gotten annoyed with being shushed and finally said to Cobb, “And what is it that _you_ do?”

“I’m the brains of the operation,” Cobb had snapped, and Arthur had actually caught Yusuf rolling his eyes.

And now Arthur watched Cobb from his spot lying rather uncomfortably on the stony ground. Cobb was squinting at him, obviously thinking hard about what to do about his prisoner problem. They had a ways to go to the border, which was where Arthur had gathered they were heading, though he wasn’t sure why and wasn’t even sure that he cared.

“Knock him out,” he said at last, and Arthur grimaced despite himself, squeezing his eyes shut and waiting for the blow to come.

“But—” he heard Yusuf say.

“Do it,” Cobb said, and Arthur waited, and a blow never came. Darkness fell over him like a warm, welcoming embrace.

“Well, now he can’t walk,” Yusuf said as he straightened up and tucked the phial of clear, odorless, tasteless liquid back into the bandolier that held all of his bottles.

“Or ride,” Ariadne said, standing there with her hands on her hips and not looking at all impressed with this plan of action.

“Then we treat him like baggage. He’s small; he can’t weigh that much.”

“You didn’t just drag him up that hill,” Yusuf countered. “If he’s so light, why don’t you carry him?”

“I’m not inclined to pay people who don’t perform the tasks I’m paying them for,” Cobb said, and that was that.

But that was not all that was happening that evening. Not so terribly far behind them, a stranger in black was trailing them steadily and had been for some time, drawing ever closer as Arthur continually stalled their progress. The three of them had first seen the stranger that morning, a very long way behind them, only just a dark speck visible across the miles that stretched out behind them as they headed into the highlands. Over the course of the day, however, that speck had grown steadily larger, until it wasn’t so much a speck as a dot, and then a vague figure about the size of ant (from their perspective, naturally). Though they still could not tell who it was – or even if they were man, woman, or otherwise – there was no doubt among them that this stranger in black spelled trouble.

“We’ll have to press on to the border,” Cobb announced, once they’d mounted their horses, Arthur slung across the saddle of his own and tied there so as not to slide off while unconscious. “Whoever it is draws closer each minute; we can’t afford to rest any longer.”

Press on they did, though the terrain was difficult and leading a fourth horse with an unconscious rider slowed them down. Though putting Arthur to sleep had been his own idea, Cobb declared in frustration not an hour later, "This is going too slowly." They stopped at the top of a ridge and turned to find whoever or whatever it was that was tracking them gaining even more quickly, visible down in the valley and far too close for comfort. "Ariadne,” Cobb said, “you stay behind and stop him.”

“What?” Ariadne exclaimed. “I don't stop people. I'm an illusionist.”

“Then relieve this stranger of the _illusion_ that they can stop _us_ ,” Cobb said as he took from Ariadne the reigns of the horse that was quite begrudgingly and rather awkwardly bearing Arthur's comatose body.

“I don't think _illusion_ means what you think it means,” Ariadne muttered, but Cobb's forte had never been listening, and he was already riding off, Arthur in tow. Yusuf hesitated for a moment, but Ariadne just rolled her eyes.

He responded with a shrug and, “Good luck,” and then he was gone.

Ariadne was not cut out for this sort of work. In those days, magically gifted young people had a variety of paths from which they might choose, and Ariadne had forgone what might have been more lucrative careers in alchemy or necromancy in favor of the illusory arts because she enjoyed creating impossible buildings and places that defied imagination. What she’d failed to take into account when she entered her apprenticeship was that out in the world, there was very little demand for unreal constructs.

So she’d turned to thievery, which was something that her skill set played into nicely, except that then she’d been caught and hauled off to the city jail, and the only reason she was free now was because someone of influence back in the capital had wanted Dominic Cobb to kidnap the future prince consort, and so she’d been recruited.

She did not like this job, but she hadn’t liked prison much either. “All right,” she said to herself. “Stop them. No problem.”

And after a few more moments’ thought, she closed her eyes, and she began to build.

The stranger had had a very long day. Merely due to the timing of his arrival, the kidnappers had gotten quite a head start, and making up the difference had been a bit taxing, both for him and his horse. To make matters more frustrating, when he reached the crest of the hill over which he had seen the party go not a quarter hour before, he hit a wall.

The wall was rough-hewn black stone, at least thirty feet in height. It contained exactly one door, large and arched, and nothing more. The stranger stared at it for a long moment, for it had certainly not been here before, and appeared to stretch to either side beyond reckoning. There was no telling how long it would take to go around, and when the stranger dismounted and peered through the open doorway, there were three different paths, long halls with walls as high as the outer one, stretching off into shadow.

“Well,” the stranger said, and that was all he said, because he was the only person there and he tried to stay out of the habit of talking to animals. He thought for a moment, then turned, and from his saddle he took a length of rope and a leather satchel of various iron implements. Afterward, he efficiently removed the horse’s bridle and saddle, and tossed the tack into a nearby thicket.

“It appears that our journey together is over,” he said, for though he tried not to make it a habit, there are some times when words are necessary, and goodbyes are one of those times.

It would have been impressive, the way he climbed the sheer stone perimeter wall of what he had correctly deduced to be a maze. It would have been just as impressive, the way he made his way across the maze when he reached the top, alternately following walls and leaping passageways. The whole thing was quite a feat of strength, balance, and nerve. However, no one was there to see, which begs the question of whether it was really impressive at all. I could describe to you at length what standing on a thirty foot wall is like, how narrow the walls were, how dark the gaps between them when one peered down into the corridors below. I could attempt to convince you of how difficult it is to make a six foot jump from one narrow, crumbling wall to another, and to do it repeatedly? I could describe the muscle fatigue, the prodigious amount of energy expended. But would any of it really matter? Nothing seems impressive on paper. Exciting, perhaps, but excitement is much easier to come by than impressiveness, and so it really wouldn’t be worth the effort or wasted time.

And so, the stranger cut more or less straight across the maze, his rope coiled over one shoulder, and when he reached the far side, he climbed back down and found himself face to face with Ariadne herself, who just stared at him for a moment before spreading her arms in defeat and exclaiming, “What?”

“Oh, is this your maze?” the stranger asked, and Ariadne spread her arms wider.

“Who else’s would it be? That’s not how you do a maze!”

“Seems to me that the point of a maze is to find the quickest way to the other side, which I believe that I did,” the stranger said. He sounded amused, but it was difficult to tell if that was the case; in addition to being dressed from head to toe in a black – shirt, vest, breeches, and boots – he also had a black mask on, as well as a heavy black cloak of a sort that wrapped around his shoulders and head and obscured his mouth. He looked very stylish, Ariadne thought. Very suave. Like a gentleman thief. She hated him a little, but only because she was a thief and she had not yet worked out how to be so suave or stylish in her line of work. She did have a scarf however, but a much smaller one.

“I suppose you’re going to try to stop me,” the stranger added.

Ariadne rolled her eyes and halfheartedly thrust a hand in the direction of the maze. “That was me trying to stop you,” she said. “Now you’re probably going to ask, if I could create that, why can’t I just create an unstoppable warrior who could gut you where you stand? And the answer to that is very complicated and involves a lot of magical theory about the relative solidity of an illusory object to a real one and the capabilities of illusory beings relative to the skill sets of their creators.”

“I’m well aware,” the stranger replied lightly. “I’ve run into illusionists before, and believe me, your maze alone has shown that you are a singularly skilled illusionist. Visionary, even.”

“Are you trying to flatter your way past me?”

“You seem to have implied that I’ve already passed you.”

Ariadne shrugged, but then slid her hand into one pocket of her leather jacket and produced from it a small, smooth stone about the size of her palm. “I’m supposed to stop you. I have very good aim.”

“I have very fast reflexes,” the stranger replied, and Ariadne believed him, because he’d apparently leapt his way across the top of her maze.

“You’re not one of the king’s men,” she said after a moment, narrowing her eyes at him, pondering her options.

“No, I am not,” the stranger confirmed. “Merely an interested party.”

“Interested how?”

“In stopping your employer from harming a single hair on your prisoner’s head,” the stranger said, and his voice was suddenly quite sharp. “Now. You can throw that stone at me and start a fight, or you can let me pass and go off to do whatever it is that you’d like best. I’ll be sure to tell anyone who might be upset with you all about how soundly I beat you, if that would help.”

Ariadne pursed her lips and considered. And then she said, finally, “It just might.” She stepped aside, and as the stranger passed she called after him, “Hurry up. I don’t know what Cobb might do after they cross the border.”

It only occurred to her after the stranger was already gone that he hadn’t taken her horse, and he had none of his own. But the stranger had no need of them, because it was downhill from here, and where anyone on horseback would have to make careful progress on switchbacks and clear trails, a single athletic man on foot could simply cut across the steep terrain at will. It was far better this way.

Cobb and Yusuf were halfway to the coast from the place they'd left Ariadne when Yusuf looked back over his shoulder and said with a sigh, "Whoever was following us is still following us." And indeed, the stranger in black was making his way down the slope toward them at considerable speed – he had even gained on them already. "And before you say it, this is not at all inconceivable. Ariadne isn't a warrior, Cobb. I hope she's all right."

"You should start hoping you do better than she did," Cobb said, squinting at the figure in the distance in his most displeased fashion. He grabbed the reins of the horse still carrying Arthur from Yusuf. "Hold him off. All that matters is getting over the border."

“I don’t think I like this method of prioritization,” Yusuf muttered as Cobb disappeared down past a rocky outcropping. He dismounted, and tied his horse, and he found a boulder that was slightly less uncomfortable than the other boulders in the area to sit on and wait.

When the stranger in black came round the bend, Yusuf stood and brushed off his pants. The stranger stopped short, then bowed slightly in a way that could have come off as mocking but didn’t quite. “Good evening,” he said. “I hate to rush, but I am in a _bit_ of one, so if we might just skip straight to the point.”

“The point?” Yusuf asked. “I’ve been put here to stop you.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” the stranger said, “but how are you planning on doing so?”

One eyebrow crept up, and Yusuf replied a bit warily, “I’m an alchemist.” And he gestured vaguely to the broad leather bandolier he wore, covered with pockets containing a myriad of bottles and little boxes, each one containing a substance most people would rather not have met.

“And what does your employer hope you’ll do to me? Turn me into gold?”

Yusuf snorted. He was used to such jibes, because of course no alchemist had ever succeeded at such a thing, and Yusuf thought the men who tried were fools. “Alchemists have got our fingers in a little bit of everything these days.”

“I’m well aware. I’m asking what your _employer_ thought you would do to me.”

“Speaking of points, is there one? To this?”

The stranger straightened up a bit and crossed his arms over his broad chest. He looked quite strong, and Yusuf had seen enough of him coming down the rocky hillside to realize that he was both fleet of foot and quick of reflex. Alchemists, as a whole, were very good at poisoning and trickery (and rather well suited to kidnapping), but not so admirably equipped for direct confrontation with very capable opponents.

“See here, I don’t wish to fight you,” the stranger said. “You have your concoctions and I’ve my strength, both of which are capable, I’m sure, of dealing quite a lot of damage, but neither of which is particularly suited to countering the other. I think that we both know that any physical combat between the two of us would end in a very large mess that neither of us would be very pleased with. So, I propose that we negotiate.”

“You don’t have anything that I want.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” the stranger replied. “Here are some options for you. One is that we do battle, and you win. The other is that we do battle, I win, and you have one very angry client who is very, very displeased with you, and everything that entails. I would say those chances are, at best for you, about fifty-fifty: receiving your reward or losing your life. On the other hand, you could let me go on and leave for Proclus with a head start and the twenty florins I will give you, right now, in exchange for your cooperation. When you arrive there, I will find you, and I will make you a truly rich man. I am the Dread Pirate Charles, and a pirate’s word is bond.”

One of Yusuf’s eyebrows shot up, and it was impossible to tell whether he believed the stranger or not. “Unless pirates are simply liars,” he pointed out, though he was obviously thinking about what the stranger was offering.

“In which case you will still be in Proclus, a very beautiful kingdom with a lovely climate, safe and with at least eighteen florins left over from the cost of your passage.” Yusuf narrowed one eye, and he thought about Ariadne, and a pang of guilt hit him at the realization that if he didn’t stop this man, she would certainly be caught too. And Yusuf had always been a man who preferred to hedge his bets.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked at last. “What is it that you want with him?”

“Ah,” the stranger said, “that is a long story that we will have to tell you in Proclus. Suffice it to say that next time you see him, he will be both alive and unharmed.” He produced a leather pouch from within the pocket of his tunic, and he offered it to Yusuf. Inside there were indeed at least twenty florins.

Yusuf pocketed it, thought for another moment, and then retrieved a little phial of clear liquid from his bandolier. “Take this. It’s what we used to put the boy to sleep; he’s dreaming, and if you wish to wake him, you will have to go into the dreaming as well, and let him know that he is asleep. A drop is all it will take. _Don’t forget that you’re asleep_ or you’ll both be in a lot of trouble. There was a boat waiting for us at the Unswimmable Channel. It’s not far, and I don’t think Cobb has the slightest idea how to raise a sail, so it’s likely taking him much longer than it should to actually get on his way.”

The stranger took the phial, looked at it for a moment, then nodded. “Thank you, ah…”

“Yusuf.”

“Yusuf. You’re a good man.”

“Eh, I’m all right.”

When the stranger reached the last descent to the rocky beaches along the channel, Cobb had already dumped Arthur in the bottom of a small, solitary boat, and he was indeed having a great deal of trouble getting the vessel’s little sail raised. He glanced up, saw the stranger at the top of the ridge, and sighed somewhat dramatically. “Inconceivable,” he muttered to himself, and there was no one close and conscious enough to correct him. He dropped the ropes, jumped out of the boat, and pushed off the shore anyhow. The boat did have oars, and though it was wide, intended to be maneuvered by two men and with oars that were heavy enough to reflect that, Cobb could use both of them well enough to at least get them away from shore, and that was all that mattered. Once there, he could get the sail working, for they would be untouchable.

The reason that the Unswimmable Channel was unswimmable was because of the shrieking eels.

But the stranger didn’t seem to know that, because he ran down the slope toward the water at surprising speed, and he leapt across the boulders that lined the shore with surprising ease, and he sprinted across the sand of the little strip of beach straight toward the boat. “I wouldn’t do that if—” Cobb shouted at him, but before he could even properly begin gloating, the stranger dived straight into the water. “Um.”

The way the man hurled himself into the channel was shocking enough, but the subsequent sound of the eels shrieking was even more so. For a time that was all that could be heard, an ear-piercing cacophony like a thousand crows caught in a grain thresher, and then there was a great splashing, and all went silent. Except for the sound of the water lapping gently at the boat, there was little to be heard, and it seemed the stranger was gone for good.

Until a black-gloved hand shot from the water and grabbed onto the side of the boat, and the rest of the man followed with it. He hauled himself onto the boat with great effort, and soon stood dripping in the middle of it, staring at Cobb with a withering glare and a heaving chest. He said nothing. Somehow, he was still wearing all that he’d taken into the water, including his sword in its scabbard, his mask, and the cloak that obscured the remainder of his face. The cloak was torn badly, but otherwise he appeared to be whole.

Cobb could’ve attacked the stranger, perhaps, at any time, but some things are just too surprising to really react to as one might have with the benefit of hindsight. Instead, Cobb merely exclaimed, “How the hell did you do that?”

To which the stranger replied, “Like this,” and he punched Cobb square in the face.

With Cobb unconscious, the stranger took the oars and navigated back to shore – not without difficulty, but at least without major mishap. Once there, he carried Arthur to shore and laid him out on the sand, and then he raised the little sail, tied Cobb to the mast with a spare bit of rope, and shoved the boat away from shore, watching it drift away only long enough to make sure that it would continue on and out to sea.

Though he knew he didn’t need to, the stranger checked Arthur’s pulse as he laid him out on his back, and sighed as he found it normal. He hesitated over him a moment, just staring, and then retrieved the little phial, wet but otherwise unharmed, from his pocket. It had an odd, thin neck below the cork, one that would ensure that only a drop at a time was released.

The idea that a single drop would put him to sleep, and that moreover he could find Arthur in the dream he’d have, might have sounded a bit absurd to some people. But the stranger had been to some odd places and seen some odd things, and in some cultures, people insisted that dreams were another plane of their own existence, not merely individual flights of nocturnal fancy. Who was he to say that they were wrong?

He stretched out alongside Arthur and uncorked the bottle, and a single drop later, he was suddenly somewhere else entirely. It left him reeling, but he reminded himself sharply that he was dreaming, that this wasn’t real. It felt real, however; it felt like a place the stranger hadn’t been to in some time but knew extremely well. In one direction there were mountains, visible across miles of fields. To his other side, there was a forest, and at the edge of the forest was a small farm.

There seemed to be nowhere else to go. No towns visible, nor even other homes, and no roads leading in any direction. The little farm was an island in a virgin landscape, and so Eames headed toward it.

As he neared it, he noticed a figure off in one of the pastures, putting a large chestnut mare through her paces. He stopped short, taken quite off guard by the fact that even from a distance, he knew the figure. Knew his bearing and form and movements. Knew the color of his hair, and even his clothing. His heart pounded in his chest, and he looked around for Arthur, but there was no one else out here. And so he went over to the little house, a simple but attractively proportioned and painted building, and he let himself inside.

The front room was small and welcoming, and the stranger was as struck, as he had been by the man outside, with the unexpected presence of a great many things in it that he recognized. The evening outside was warm, but there was still a small fire burning in the hearth, and the temperature of the room seemed hardly affected by it.

There was the sound of a chair scraping on floorboards, and footsteps from another room, and after a few moments Arthur appeared in one of the doorways, one arm full of papers. In reality his hair had been shorn short, but here it was long and curled over his forehead and about his ears. He was smiling, his dimples on display, but that expression vanished as he stopped dead in his tracks and dropped the papers all over the floor. It took him a moment to even recover enough to blurt out, "Who are you? What are you doing here?"

To his credit, it was quite startling to find a man all in black, the upper half of his face obscured by a mask and the lower by the cloak wrapped over his shoulders. Likewise to his credit, no sooner were the words out of his mouth than he dove a few feet to his left, to the hearth, and grabbed hold of one of the heavy iron pokers. "Who are you?!" he asked again, brandishing the implement and sounding much angrier now that the initial shock was wearing off.

The stranger held up his hands, not in surrender but in a calming gesture that didn’t seem to do much good. “I’m here to wake you up, Arthur,” he said. “You’ve been dreaming.”

Around them, the edges of the world rippled, just slightly, like the surface of water might under a light breeze. And then it stabilized as Arthur replied firmly, “I’ve been _writing_.” The stranger noticed that on his hand he wore a simple silver band where in reality he wore nothing, and he narrowed his eyes. Arthur narrowed his in return, though most likely not for the same reason. “My husband is much less patient than I am. And much bigger. He’ll be back any time.”

“No, he won’t,” the stranger replied, his voice much softer than it might have been. “This is a dream. Your husband is dead. Remember?”

Arthur looked had he just been hit in the back of the skull with a brick; he went blank, utterly blank, and after a moment the ground began to tremble, and then the house started to shake. A glass fell from a table and shattered, and then a mirror fell off the wall, and everything else quickly began to follow. Fear flashed across Arthur's face, but then he refocused on the stranger and it changed swiftly to fury. Arthur started for him, wielding the poker as though he meant to use it, but at that moment, the ceiling collapsed.

Arthur’s anger carried easily over out of the dream. He awoke with a start, gasping hard and then struggling for a breath. He'd been a bit foggy while the dream collapsed, but now everything had come back to him. Eames leaving. Going to the port and hearing the news in the tavern. All of it, a rush of memories that filled his mind in an instant.

It was like losing Eames all over again. The heartbreak, the illness, the urge to scream and scream and never stop.

Even as he struggled to his knees and found the stranger nearby in the sand, pushing himself up, his mind was racing. And above all he wanted this: to destroy the man in black for destroying his world for the second time. He'd been down there for months. He’d been happy, even when he’d gone to sleep convinced that he’d never feel true happiness again. And as he got to his feet and rushed at the stranger, he was dimly aware that he had tears streaming down his cheeks.

"Why did you do that?" he cried out, and he took a swing at the man in black's face only to find his wrist caught in a lightning-quick fist. He grabbed for him with his other hand, barely even thinking about what he was doing, and got a handful of tunic but didn’t know what to do with it, and so he ineffectually tried to shove the man to the ground. "Why couldn't you leave me alone? Who are you?"

“You were kidnapped by a man who planned to kill you at the end of your journey, who trapped you in a dream to keep you complacent,” the man in black said, taking hold of Arthur’s other wrist. The man could break them for all Arthur cared; everything was over anyhow. “I would think you’d show more gratitude to the person who saved your life.”

“You _ruined_ my life! You should have left me to sleep, and if they’d killed me, it would’ve been all the better!” Arthur insisted, and he shoved at the man again, but the man only pushed him away.

“I find that hard to believe,” he countered. “Do you not enjoy your life in the castle, wanting for nothing? Is your fiancé not handsome? Surely you don’t mean to tell me that you don’t love such a man, your royal _pending_ highness.”

Arthur actually twitched at that. Not as though he’d been caught out, but rather as though he were trying to determine the best way to skin the man in black, which in fact he was. He said lowly, “I have no ability to love.”

“Really,” the man said. “And what if I were to tell you I'd been sent by your true love, and that it had been his dying wish for you to hear words of his eternal devotion? What then? Would you still sleep soundly in your royal bedchamber knowing his last breath was your name on his lips, that he died believing you were his and his only?”

That was, as they say, the last straw. Arthur surged forward and knocked the man in black to the ground. He landed hard on top of him and scrambled to sit up. Once he had, he grabbed hold of the cloak that had fallen over the man’s face completely, pulled it taut, and put his weight on it to keep the man's head pinned to the ground and his vision obscured.

"How dare you?" he half-sobbed, half-growled. "You will never know the kind of pain I've endured!" And then he punched him right in the face, or at least where it seemed as though his face was through the thick, wet black fabric. The man grunted sharply, but from the pain in his knuckles, it seemed as though Arthur had connected with the mask. He raised his fist once more, but he wasn't about to beat to death a man who wouldn't defend himself, so he ground out through gritted teeth, "Fight back!"

The man did not fight back. Instead he just murmured, nearly too muffled to be understood, “I’d really rather not, darling.”

But even muffled, the difference in his voice was unmistakable. The stranger’s sharp and haughty accent was now soft and unassuming, and his voice was lower, more of a rumble, and even without the endearment, Arthur would have known immediately that he was not at all a stranger. It was as though the whole earth beneath him gave a sickening and sudden lurch, and then he was tearing the cloak away from the man in black’s face and yanking off the mask the moment he could get his hands on it, and it was Eames there, beneath him, between his legs, staring back at Arthur with a broken expression.

It was as though Arthur had seen a ghost – tackled and punched one, even. The blood drained from his face as both hands reached up to cover his mouth as though he had to clamp down a scream. Maybe he did. He couldn’t tell; he was undergoing such a torrent of unnamable feelings that he wasn’t entirely sure what any given part of him was attempting to do in that moment. His heart pounded in his chest and all the way out to his extremities, the sound of the waves lapping at the shore drowned out by the rushing in his ears and yet, somehow, even with all of that blood making it to his head, he felt for a sickening moment as though he might pass out.

But he didn’t. Eames reached up and gently took Arthur’s wrists, and he was saying something, his lips forming the shape of Arthur’s name, but Arthur shook his head frantically and pulled away. He scrambled off of Eames, standing up and nearly falling over again immediately. He was half convinced that it wasn’t Eames at all, that this wasn’t real, but it was. It had to be; he could remember the dream he’d woken up from, but he could also remember just before they’d put him to sleep, and before that. He could remember meeting Robert, and traveling alone, and the day he’d found out that Eames had been killed. This was real, Eames was _here_ , he was _alive_ , he’d come for Arthur and—

“Arthur!” Eames exclaimed as he got up, and this time the sound actually managed to get through the din. He took hold of Arthur by the arms, gentle but firm enough to keep him from going anywhere, though Arthur tried half-heartedly to pull away. “Arthur—”

Arthur’s breaths were shallow and fast. He could barely deal with having Eames standing there in front of him, with having Eames’s hands on him, broad and warm and familiar even through his clothes. “You hate me,” he managed to get out. “Oh my god you _hate me_.”

“You’re a bit hysterical, darling,” Eames said, and Arthur could tell that he was trying to be soothing, but he didn’t want to be soothed. He just shook his head emphatically and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, trying to slow his breaths, and that was when Eames pulled Arthur into his arms fully, and he was wet for some reason, but Arthur didn’t care. “I could never hate you, Arthur. You know that,” he said insistently. “But it was a bit of a shock coming back to find you engaged. To the _prince_ , no less.”

“It’s a sham!” Arthur exclaimed, uncovering his eyes and looking at Eames. From his point of view, Eames should have known that right away. Arthur felt like such an obvious fraud in his role, he was continually shocked that anyone in the kingdom at all believed that he was actually in a relationship with Robert. “We only met last month! None of it’s _real_! He didn’t want to be forced to marry someone awful, so I told him I’d help him if he’d leave me alone and let me use the library!”

Eames looked rather shocked at that, but it only lasted a moment. Then, all at once, he was laughing, and he kissed Arthur hard, but only briefly, and then laughed some more. Arthur was a bit annoyed that Eames found that funny when he’d left Arthur dying more and more every day, but the sound of Eames’s laughter was the most wonderful thing he’d ever heard, so he took Eames’s head between his hands and pulled him into a much longer, much deeper kiss. And for the first time in what felt like an eternity, Arthur felt as though something were okay, as though _everything_ were okay. He kissed Eames until he couldn’t anymore, until they both needed air, and when they came up for it he still held Eames close, resting their foreheads together.

“I told you I’d come for you,” Eames breathed. “Why didn’t you wait?”

Arthur’s chest ached at the question, a tight squeeze that drove the air from his lungs. It took longer for him to recover from those four words than it had for Eames to speak them. “You were dead,” he murmured. “I knew I would never love again, so I found a way that I could do someone some good and be left alone.”

He tugged open the top button of his shirt, and he drew out a long chain he wore around his neck, tucked safely under his clothing. Hanging from it was the simple silver band Eames had given him. “I told you I would wait for you, and I did. I’ve spent every day waiting for death. I’ve never taken this off.”

Eames didn’t respond; rather, he looked as though he’d been slapped. Arthur furrowed his eyebrows and watched as his expression slowly shifted into something pained, something he couldn’t tamp down. Only belatedly, Arthur realized he was blinking back tears. “Eames,” he said softly, cradling his cheek, and Eames drew a sharp breath, trying to calm himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, darling. I’m a fool, really. I wanted you to have faith in me, but I came back here and was jealous. And the whole time you were asleep, you were dreaming of _me_. I’m not entirely sure what I did to deserve you. Certainly not getting back soon enough.”

“You did get back soon enough,” Arthur said, and he kissed Eames again. “You’re here. I’m alive. I haven’t committed bigamy.” He smiled just a little, just enough to let Eames know that he was joking, and got a somewhat watery smile in return. Maybe they were both fools, he thought. “But now all of that’s behind us. You’re never leaving my sight again. I’m done grieving for you.”

Eames’s smile widened, and after a moment he scrubbed at his face and looked around, though he didn’t let go of Arthur just yet. “Speaking of not leaving one another’s sight, you’re quite the important figure now, I’m afraid, and I’m not the only one out looking for you. We mustn’t procrastinate.”

“Since when do you use words like procrastinate?” Arthur asked as Eames took him by the hand and pulled him off back toward the rocky rise. Not too far up the slope away from the beach there were two horses grazing, still fully saddled. Arthur recognized one as Cobb’s, and the other as the one he himself had been riding before he was knocked out.

“I learned a great many things at sea,” Eames replied.

Arthur furrowed his brow. “Are sailors known for their vocabulary?”

“No, but the first mate of the _Cobol_ taught me to read,” Eames replied. “I asked him to. I told him that after the journey, I was going home to someone I owed quite a lot of reading to.”

He turned, and he grinned at Arthur as they stopped in front of his horse. Arthur just stared at him, and in that moment he felt quite clearly the sharp, wonderful pain of loving someone so completely. Finally, he smiled, and it was both genuine and somewhat melancholy. “I’d wanted to teach you. In Proclus.”

“And I wanted to surprise you in Proclus,” Eames countered, handing Arthur the horse’s lead.

“Well, you’ll just have to settle for having surprised me here.” And with that, Arthur climbed up and swung himself into the saddle.

They rode west along the channel, toward the open sea. They kept up the quickest pace they reasonably could, and at first Arthur wondered why they needed to evade the people from the capital who would be out looking for him. He even wondered if it wouldn’t be better to return and at least apologize to Robert and let him know where he was going. But he wondered more about what had happened to Eames’s ship, how he had escaped, and where he’d been, and as it turned out, the answer to that was also the reason that it would’ve been unwise to be caught by anyone from the capital.

“They said your ship was taken by the Dread Pirate Charles. I don’t understand how you escaped; everyone knows that he takes no prisoners.”

“She, actually,” Eames said. “And that was broadly true, yes. She took our ship, and I found myself face to face with her, and just as she drew her sword, I said, ‘Please.’ Later, she said that was what got her attention, the fact that I didn’t try to fight. I just told her, ‘I am an orphan with no family to speak of, and all of my friends are dead,’ which they were, because she had just killed them. And she asked me, ‘What reason do you even have to live, then?’ and I said, ‘True love. I will join your crew, and I will serve you loyally for as long as you wish, and I will require no pay at all if at the end of it I can go home to him. Please.’”

Eames glanced over, and he raised an eyebrow at the drawn, pale cast of Arthur’s face. Arthur had spent so many nights desperately trying not to imagine the ways in which Eames might have died, what he might have felt in that moment, what might have happened to his body. He’d been haunted by the things he would never know, and to hear about what almost had been was sickening.

“Arthur. Darling, it all worked out, you know.”

Arthur smiled, but not very brightly, and said quietly, “I know. How?”

Shrugging, Eames replied in a voice as though he were still a bit shocked by it himself, “She made me her cabin boy. Which I realize sounds a bit suspect, but as it turned out she really did just want a clean room, her meals brought to her, and conversation. She asked quite a bit about you. And every time she did, she’d say, ‘Your Arthur sounds lovely. Maybe you can see him sometime soon,’ as though it weren’t up to her.”

“But she let you go, in the end,” Arthur said, and Eames shook his head.

“No! That’s the truly incredible thing; one day she locked the door of her cabin and closed the curtains and she sat me down and said, ‘Eames, I am retiring. I’m rich beyond measure and tired even beyond that, and it is time that I go home. I would like you to be the Dread Pirate Charles for a while.’”

“Wait a moment, _what_?”

“As it turns out, she was the seventh Dread Pirate Charles. Her real name was Miles, and she’d once been the _previous_ Dread Pirate Charles’s cabin girl. It’s more of a title, albeit a secret one, that can be handed down to keep the reputation intact. So, I agreed, and so we put into port and hired a whole new crew. She posed as my first mate, and all it took for the new crew to believe that I was Charles was for her to go about calling me by it. I left her in Baltia, where I believe she intended to take up crochet. Or perhaps croquet, she had a bit of a heavy accent. After that I made my way to Proclus. Only to find, of course, that you were not there.”

Arthur frowned “I couldn’t do it. Get on a ship? I just couldn’t, not after—”

“I understand,” Eames said. “I’m not upset with you, Arthur. I put you in a nasty spot.”

“Yes,” Arthur replied. “You did.”

Eames looked over at him, and Arthur attempted to fix him with a serious look, but he knew that one of his dimples was giving him away. It was difficult to be angry when things were suddenly and unexpectedly going so exceedingly well.

That is the thing about things, however: they have a way of not continuing to go well. Arthur’s knack for escaping was a gift that is beyond explanation. Likewise, Eames’s safe return to Morrow and to Arthur was a gift that is beyond explanation. Both gifts, however, had to contend with the fact that Arthur was not, as previously discussed, very good at not getting caught. And neither, in this instance, was Eames.

Three hours later, Eames was in handcuffs at the order of Lord Peter Browning, and Arthur was trying desperately to figure a way out of the situation. He glanced back at Eames, riding a good forty feet back between two guards and glaring daggers at the back of Browning’s head. Arthur, of course, was being forced to ride alongside Browning. After all, he was not a prisoner; he was ostensibly being rescued. “This man does _not_ belong in handcuffs!” he insisted, lowly enough that he wouldn’t anger Browning by speaking so that the guards could hear him. “He saved me from my kidnappers!”

“So you’ve said a half dozen times now,” Browning said, without so much as glancing Arthur’s way.

“And yet you haven’t listened!”

“You haven’t told me anything I didn’t already know,” Browning drawled. “You’re in love with that man, are you not?”

Arthur’s mouth dropped open before he could stop it, and Browning smirked a bit when he finally looked at him. “A peasant boy who appears from nowhere, no family or friends that he will speak of, and looks to marry the Crown Prince? Did you think I wouldn’t find out who you are, pay your village a visit? Ask questions? They all seemed to think you’d gone to Proclus, oddly enough. After your lover went to sea to find his fortune, they said. And now here I am, tracking the Dread Pirate Charles whom I’ve heard tell is docked in my lands, and his trail leads me to our young kidnapped prince-to-be, who is _very_ upset that I have him in irons.”

“I thought him dead!” Arthur hissed. “I would never have agreed to marry the prince if—”

“Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t have,” Browning agreed. “It would have been a brilliant plan if you’d plotted it out with your pirate lover, to be sure, a rather ingenious way to get close to the royal treasury, but you’re far too naïve for that. If you were trying to sleep your way into the royal storehouses, you certainly wouldn’t do it by never visiting the prince’s rooms and moping about as though you’re awaiting execution. The problem with all of this, though, is that you are _going_ to marry Robert.”

“I—what? Why? You hate me.”

Browning rolled his eyes a bit. “So many people feel that way. I suppose I just have one of those faces. I don’t hate you, Arthur Addinell of Holbeck-upon-Dale. I like your meaningless family name, I like your quaint little village, and I like your sweet, common parents who would never become involved in the royal affairs of Morrow. The king wishes his son to marry for power. But I know that true power comes from military strength, not the marriage bed, and that princes and princesses bring with them far more baggage than anyone should look to carry. You, on the other hand, are small and light and can simply be… tucked away. In a broom closet. Out of sight, out of mind.”

Arthur didn’t even have to think about it; he simply knew, and when he spoke, it wasn’t because he needed confirmation. He was sounding it out loud, solidifying it. “And if I don’t marry Robert, you’ll kill Eames.”

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Browning said. “And Arthur, let’s not discuss this with Robert. He’s absolutely vexed over you. He’s been out leading a search party for days. I don’t think there’s any need to worry him further.”

The threat in Browning’s voice was barely even veiled. It was more along the lines of standing a foot from Arthur’s face staring straight at him in a very thin mist.

Now, one might think at this point that our heroes were in a bit of a jam; in fact, they were in a very large jar filled to overflowing with jam. One might be wondering what they were going to do to extricate themselves from this situation. The answer to this question is, of course, nothing. Upon arrival in the capital, Eames was brought to the city prison and locked up, and Arthur was brought to the castle and likewise locked up, but in a more figurative sense. Eames’s plan was to sit still unless an opportunity presented itself, in order to prevent any harm from coming to Arthur. Arthur’s plan was to commit bigamy in order to prevent any harm from coming to Eames.

You see, heroes do not have all of the answers all of the time. Really, heroes have very few answers a great deal of the time. Life is a path cut by a thousand different things, by tragedy and hope and random occurrences and reciprocity. This story is not about two men who had all the answers and overcame all obstacles in grand fashion using naught but their own wits and strength; this story is not one that would be so irresponsible as to pretend that men such as that exist, ones who don’t need friends to get by. At that time, Arthur and Eames needed friends. At that time, they did not have any. But they had something along somewhat, very vaguely similar lines.

We have already established that upon their arrival in the capital, Eames was brought to the prison and Arthur was returned to the castle. But let us look back a bit further than that, back to their arrival itself. In order to get to the castle, and to the prison not far from there, Browning and his guards and his prisoners – both of them – had to ride through town, up the winding main street that climbed the hill upon which the capital sat. The main street was always bustling, and whenever a procession such as this made its way through, everyone on it would stop to watch, and many more would gather otherwise on balconies and in doorways to gawk and gossip about the passers-by on their way to the castle.

On this day, the inevitable crowds included Yusuf, who had gone in search of Ariadne after his meeting with Eames, and Ariadne, who’d aided Yusuf in his search by searching for him as well. Their searches had found mutual success, and they were planning on leaving the country together. They’d only come through the capital to stay for one night and purchase supplies for their journey to the coast, counting on the crowds and size of the city to keep them anonymous. They were on their way out when the procession came through.

“That’s interesting,” Yusuf said, peering around the corner from the dark, damp, and rather narrow alleyway they’d squeezed themselves into.

Ariadne watched with wide eyes and furrowed brows as the prince’s fiancé, whom they’d so recently kidnapped and subsequently lost, rode by on his way back to the castle, looking far more despondent than he had when he’d been on his way to the border to be killed. Her eyes narrowed then – but her brows remained furrowed – as the stranger who’d beaten her maze and bested Yusuf with logic followed, between two guards and in shackles atop his horse. He was unmasked now, but she recognized his clothing as well as his rather remarkable biceps that could be discerned even through his shirtsleeves.

“Something is wrong,” she said.

Yusuf sighed heavily. “Oh, here we go.”

“Something is wrong, Yusuf!”

“The world is wrong, Ariadne. Somewhere out there puppies are dying, old ladies are having their purses stolen, and perfectly good toast is falling butter side down. You and I need to get to the port and get out of Morrow.”

“The man in black isn’t going to be able to pay you anything more if he’s stuck in the city jail across the sea from Proclus!”

“We don’t know that he wasn’t lying anyway!” Yusuf exclaimed, and he gestured emphatically to go along with it, but Ariadne wasn’t looking; she was peeking out of the alley, watching the prince’s fiancé and the man in black and the cadre of guards moving away off up the main street and out of sight. “And now you’re curious,” he said, dropping his arms. “You don’t always have to stick your nose in everyone else’s beeswax, you know. That’s how you get stung. In the nose. Which is the worst place to get stung, by the way!”

Ariadne turned suddenly and grabbed Yusuf by both arms. “He’s in love with Arthur!”

“Who’s Arthur?”

“The man we kidnapped! You’re telling me you forgot?”

“I never knew; I thought it would be best not to get too chummy with a man I was kidnapping. Who’s in love with Arthur?”

“The man in black!” Ariadne exclaimed. Her eyes were shining, which was usually a bad sign. “Why else would he come so far and risk so much to save an average peasant boy who’s betrothed to someone else?”

“I feel as though the betrothed-to-someone-else bit of this isn’t really hitting home with you.”

“If you love someone, you don’t care if they’re betrothed to someone else!”

“Now I know that definitely isn’t—”

“You risk yourself anyway because even if they’ve broken your heart and you can’t be together, you still love them and you’ll still do anything to protect them! That’s what love is!”

It is worth noting, at this point, that neither Ariadne nor Yusuf had yet been in love. Yusuf had thought he was, once, but it was only a side effect of working with mind-altering plants without thick enough gloves, and when the very friend he’d thought he was in love with gifted him new and better gloves, the troublesome emotions had cleared right up. Ariadne, on the other hand, had simply never found the time. She was, however, a very perceptive woman who was very good at riddles, and in this case despite her lack of personal experience she was absolutely correct: even when love is angry or spurned or painful, love is selfless, and love is the reason a person would travel so far at so much risk to save someone betrothed to another.

“Something is wrong. We need to make it right,” Ariadne said in a tone that brooked no argument.

That was not to say that Yusuf wouldn’t try. “Since when are we in the business of making things right?”

“We’re going to Proclus to make a fresh start. You can’t have a fresh start with a guilty conscience,” Ariadne told him, and she wasn’t even waiting anymore. She’d simply taken Yusuf by the sleeve and was dragging him out of the alley and into the maze of back passages and stairs that led back up the hill toward the castle.

There was a bit of discussion about whether they should attempt to find the man in black or Arthur first, but in the end they decided upon Arthur. Ariadne was not particularly keen on hurrying back to the prison she’d only so recently been released from, and they already knew the back way into the castle from the kidnapping. And so they waited until darkness fell, and they made their way through the old forgotten crypt under the center of town, and out through the drainage system of the castle grounds where they had to put to sleep and hide a guard who was for some reason stationed at the entrance to it, and through the orchard, and up the outer walls to the window of the Arthur’s private quarters. At the top of it, Ariadne slowly pulled the window open and peered over the ledge only to find Arthur standing there, already wielding the replacement for his previous elaborate porcelain washbasin.

“Please don’t hit me with that,” Ariadne said to him.

“Are you really trying this again?” Arthur asked angrily, hefting the washbasin just to show her that they was only delaying the inevitable. “I am not in the mood to put up with it this time. I have more important things to worry about.”

“Yes, we know!” Ariadne said. “The man in black who saved you spared our lives, all right? We sort of owe him. Can we please come in? Hanging off of a rope like this is a bit tiring.”

Arthur stepped back from the window after a moment of thought, but his suspicious glare didn’t soften, and he didn’t put down the washbasin. Both Ariadne and Yusuf took seats on the edge of the bed without being offered them once they hauled themselves up in to the room. Yusuf was puffing a little, and Ariadne massaged her rope-burned palms.

“If you’re interested in Eames, why are you here?” Arthur asked. He looked and sounded rather conflicted: suspicious, yet undoubtedly interested. Perhaps even tentatively hopeful.

“Is that his name?” Ariadne asked. “They’re telling everyone that he’s the Dread Pirate Charles.”

“He is,” Arthur said.

“Oh.” Ariadne frowned. “Charles Eames, then?”

“No. Just Eames.” Eames did have a first name, as well as a last one. Eames was his middle name. He simply preferred it, and Arthur chose to respect that.

“All right, then. Listen, I think we should help. Yusuf feels less strongly, but he’ll come around.”

“No choice,” Yusuf added.

“But,” Ariadne continued, “I didn’t want to do anything rash.”

Arthur raised one eyebrow, and he slowly lowered the washbasin, though he didn’t put it down. “Like breaking into the castle for the second time in a fortnight?” 

“Like storming the jail. Before I do something stupid, I’d like to know what’s going on and who this Eames is. He’s obviously in love with you, but we don’t know how you feel about him. He could be a stalker.”

“How do you know he’s in love with me?” Arthur asked, eyes narrowed. He didn’t know what to make of that. He shifted his weight edgily, as though he found the assumption somehow threatening, though he couldn’t have articulated why. Perhaps because he was having a very vulnerable part of himself laid bare unexpectedly.

“No one would do what he did for you unless they were in love with you,” Ariadne said matter-of-factly.

Arthur stared at her for a long moment. Those words did something odd to him, and it must have shown on his face, because Yusuf asked, “Are you going to cry?”

“No,” Arthur said, and he sank into a chair, the washbasin still in his lap. He was clutching the rim of it tightly, and it was fairly clear that it was now less of a potential weapon and more merely something convenient to hold onto. It all came spilling out then. The story of how he’d known Eames and how Eames had gone away to sea to try to build a future for them, how Eames had died, how Arthur had died, how he’d met the Crown Prince and become engaged to him. His life the past year, ever since Eames had gone away, felt like someone else’s in the telling. He was experiencing an odd detachment, a sort of floating feeling; it was all a bit too much to try to conceive of at once, something he could only think about in small bits or he would never be able to really understand it. “And then you kidnapped me, and I still have no idea what that Cobb person was after at all.”

Ariadne and Yusuf glanced at each other. “Cobb didn’t want anything,” Yusuf said. “He’s only a mercenary. He was hired to take you over the Brythonian border, kill you, and make it looks as though the Brythonians had done it. I don’t know who paid for us; a go-between brought us half payment and instructions on all of the ways to get into the castle unseen.”

Suddenly, the blood drained from Arthur’s face, and his jaw went slack. “Are you all right?” Ariadne asked, and Arthur just shook his head slowly, his eyes still distant and unfocused.

“You were hired to start a war,” he said quietly.

“We rather thought so, but there’s not much of a way to be sure,” Yusuf said, and Arthur finally came back from wherever his mind had gone and looked at them.

“You were hired by Lord Peter Browning, the head of the Royal Council,” he said, his voice oddly flat. “This afternoon, when he brought me back to these rooms, he reminded me that it would be extremely unpleasant for me if I told Robert about Eames when he returns home, and then he said, ‘And don’t think you can sneak off. I know every way in and out of this castle.’”

“That would explain why there was a guard stationed at the entrance to the sewers,” Ariadne said immediately.

“And why he was watching the orchard and not the sewers,” Yusuf added.

Arthur finally slid the washbasin to the floor next to him and leaned forward, burying his face in his hands and rubbing his eyes as he tried to think. “That’s why he’s insisting I go through with the marriage. He’s going to have me killed at the wedding instead and frame Brythonia for it, and then he’s going to kill Eames.”

“If he hasn’t already.”

“Yusuf!” Ariadne exclaimed. Arthur had looked up, half ill and half affronted, and Ariadne held out her hands in a calming gesture. “If Eames is the Dread Pirate Charles, there’s no doubt that Browning will save him until after the wedding, when he can execute him publicly and take the credit for it.”

“Yes,” Arthur said, but his mouth was so dry his voice was barely audible at all, and Ariadne took a deep breath and thought fast and hard.

“All right. Don’t leave yet,” Ariadne said as she got to her feet. “If anyone discovers that you’re gone, we’ll never make it into the prison. Yusuf and I are going to go retrieve your husband, and we’ll come back for you.”

“We will?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” Yusuf did not sound like he thought that was really all right, but he stood up and came over to Arthur, reaching into one of his leather pouches. He came back with a bottle much like the one he’d given to Eames, with its little stopper and narrow neck. “This is the same compound I used on you,” he said. “Do not drip any on yourself or anyone else you would prefer not to have to go into a dream to retrieve. And one drop is enough; please don’t waste it. I’ve already lost the one I gave to Eames to awaken you, and it’s not exactly something I can whip up in grandma’s kitchen with ingredients from the herb garden.”

Arthur took it, and stared at it for a moment, and then looked at the both of them in turn, his brow slightly furrowed. “Why are you risking yourselves to help us?”

“You’ve found true love. Do you think that happens every day?” Ariadne asked, but Yusuf rolled his eyes.

“It’s partially our fault. We’ll fix it,” he said. Ariadne frowned without even turning to look at him, and as though he sensed her irritation and wanted to make it worse, he added, “Also, your husband owes me a not insubstantial sum of money.”

“And there it is,” Ariadne said. “We’ll be back. Act natural while we’re gone.”

Fortunately for Arthur, as far as anyone in the castle knew, what was natural for him was being antisocial and sitting around looking tense and unhappy. It was quite easy for him to do exactly that.

It was not much to Browning’s credit, as such, that he didn’t have Eames secretly killed the moment they reached the capital; rather, he was savvy enough to know that when one has a hostage, one should not kill the hostage until one has what one is after, and in this case Browning did not have what he was after just yet. And so he had Eames thrown into a cell to await the point at which Browning would decide to dispose of him. Eames, for his part, had a very bad feeling about all of this. Of course he was going to come up with a way to escape, but he had very little conception of exactly what forces were at work here or how they would respond if he were to get out. And that worried him, when they had Arthur somewhere in the castle. And so he thought about his options, and he bided his time.

Biding his time was not easy, because in the cell across the dark, dank hall was the man who’d kidnapped Arthur. Cobb, Eames seemed to recall. Apparently he hadn’t made it very far in that little boat. Eames sat against the wall in his sell, his arms resting on his knees, wondering what Cobb had done or whom he’d angered to get thrown in there. Eames was taking the fall for Cobb’s crime, wasn’t he?

Cobb mirrored him against the far wall, and they glared. For hours they were silent, as though they could pretend that they weren’t breathtakingly angry at once another. It was Cobb who broke first. “So. Your rescue attempt didn’t end particularly well, I see.”

Eames drew a deep breath, cocked his head to one side, and licked his lips. “You kidnapped and attempted to murder the only person in this world who means anything to me. Do yourself a favor and remember how I bested your illusionist and your alchemist. Remember how I fought my way through the shrieking eels with my bare hands. Remember those things, and think on what a man such as myself might succeed in doing to you, even in a place such as this, if I were to find myself in a situation in which I no possessed meaningful regard for my own life.”

Blessedly, Cobb seemed to take the threat as serious, which it was. Eames had never been so serious in his life. He was thinking of possible means of escape, but he was also thinking of ways to get to Cobb and make him an extremely unhappy man. Eames was very good at juggling multiple tasks.

It was fortunate for Cobb, really, that Eames did not have to plan his own escape in the end, and that Eames did not end up a man with no meaningful regard for his own life. Not a half hour after their brief exchange of hostilities, there was a sound from deeper within the prison. It was muffled by distance, and by the thick wooden door at the end of the cell block, but it sounded like shouting, which was then quite abruptly cut off by a thud and followed by a not insignificant amount of dragging and scraping noises.

At this point, it would be worth noting that when it came to the bungling of the Arthur’s kidnapping, it was largely the questionable leadership of Dominic Cobb that was to blame. Given, neither Ariadne nor Yusuf was an experienced kidnapper, but likewise neither was experienced at breaking into prisons. Nonetheless, when left to their own devices, they found that they immediately fell into both a mutual understanding and a rhythm.

This was quite likely the most heavily-fortified prison on the continent, but breaking in was very different from breaking out. One didn’t have to whittle away at iron bars for weeks with a piece of string, or avoid being seen. At least, not the way Ariadne and Yusuf did things. Any guards unlucky enough to be caught alone were dispatched easily in a variety of ways by Yusuf's various potions and Ariadne’s quiet gait. Groups took longer, and generally had to be corralled and confused by Ariadne's illusions until Yusuf got them or she managed to lock them up in their own cells. It was slow going, but it was vital to be thorough and take care of anyone who came upon them before an alarm could be raised.

This very thoroughness was why when the door to Eames's cell block slammed open, Yusuf had a dozen empty bottles dangling on leather cords from his belt and Ariadne was practically limping under the weight of all the heavy iron key rings she had in her arms. It was also why when the solitary guard who’d been napping most of the evening at the end of the hall jumped up and came running at them, Yusuf simply punched him in the teeth instead of trying something fancier and sighed, "Thirty-two."

Eames did not jump up to see what was happening or who had arrived. His figuring was that whoever it was and whatever they were doing would reach his end of the hall soon enough. Cobb, on the other hand, ran to the front of his cell to look, and so it was he who called out, “Ariadne! Yusuf! How’d you know I was in here? Great work!”

Upon hearing this, and seeing who’d arrived, Eames just dropped his face into his arms and muttered, “What have I done in life to deserve this?”

There was a great clatter akin to the sound of a giant’s silverware drawer being upended on a kitchen floor, and that was Ariadne dropping all of the keys. It startled Eames enough that he looked up, and he was surprised to find her crouched in front of his own cell door, the key rings scattered about her knees as she examined the lock and the rings in turn in her search for the match.

“What are you doing?” Cobb exclaimed, and Eames sat up a bit straighter.

“What _are_ you doing?” he echoed.

“No one gets out of my debt by going to prison,” Yusuf said, and though Ariadne’s eyelids lowered a bit and her lips pursed while she tried one of her keys unsuccessfully, Eames only laughed as he realized that he was, in fact, not going to have to fight his way out of here.

“Do you still want to save your true love and get the hell out of Morrow?” Ariadne asked him as he got to his feet.

“Well, seems as though I haven’t anything better to do,” Eames replied, but he was almost cut off by Cobb.

“Wait a minute. You’re seriously here for _him_? What has he done? Aside from set me adrift in the channel to be picked up by the Royal Navy and carted back here. It’s his fault I’m even in this mess!”

“Really, it’s mostly _your_ fault that any of us are in this mess,” Yusuf said, finally glancing over his shoulder and acknowledging Cobb. At that moment, Ariadne tried a key that clicked in the lock, and she was able to scramble back to her feet and haul the door open with some difficulty; it was quite heavy, and the cells this deep in the prison were rather seldom used.

“So you’re really just going to leave me here?” Cobb asked as Eames came out and dragged the door shut behind himself. All three of them stopped and stared, and Cobb focused on Ariadne. “You’re going to leave me in here when I had you _released_?”

“I may still end up back in my cell. I prefer not to repay my chickens before they’ve hatched,” Ariadne said, and she turned on her heel, her long, dark hair swaying behind her as she set off. Yusuf followed, but Eames just stared at Cobb for a moment, and then at the pile of keys still on the floor. After a moment, he swept the lot of them across the hall with one foot, until they were just within Cobb’s reach.

“Hope you’re better at unlocking doors than you are at raising sails, mate.”

Time was of the essence; sooner or later, someone would discover that the entire staff of the royal prison were either incapacitated or locked up in their own jail, and then things would get very difficult for them. Ariadne and Yusuf, with Eames in tow, made record time through the crypts and the sewers and the orchards, and up the rear wall of the castle. It was only after they were all the way back inside that they hit a stumbling block, and that stumbling block was that Arthur was gone. The room was empty. There was no sign of a struggle, but the door was slightly ajar, and upon inspection, it had recently been forced open while locked.

“Bloody hell,” Yusuf muttered. Eames had a great deal more that he could say, but he felt too sick with dread to say anything at all, and before he could even come up with a new plan of action, there were footsteps in the hall. They were fast approaching, but there was only one set of them. The three of them stilled as one, Eames lurking just behind the door, and the moment whoever it was tried to come in, Eames reached around the door, grabbed the person by the collar, and hauled them inside violently.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, as he examined what he’d come up with. He’d been expecting a guard, but this man was not wearing armor but rather fine leather riding clothes, and he did not have a helmet but he did have practically perfect hair. He was very beautiful, and he looked affronted more than anything at being manhandled unexpectedly.

“Who are _you_?” the man echoed.

“Hes the Crown Prince, I think,” Ariadne offered helpfully, to Eames.

“He’s not the Crown Prince; I am;” Robert said, trying to give her a glare but unable to really look around with Eames’s hands still holding tight to his collar.

“Yes, that’s what I just said.”

There was a certain visceral reaction that Eames couldn’t help but having to Prince Robert; it didn’t matter that Arthur’s impending marriage had been one of loveless, sexless convenience. It still made him quite unhappy to think about, and it made him even unhappier that Robert was really quite strikingly handsome and classically prince-like. And so perhaps he was a bit rougher than necessary when he dragged Robert the few feet over to one of the chairs near the fireplace and pushed him down into it.

No sooner had he done so than Ariadne had a long, elegant rapier poised at the prince’s neck, just close enough to be a threat. Ariadne had not been wearing a rapier a moment before, but what would have been the point in being an illusionist if one had to cart around actual weapons in order to threaten people with them?

“I haven’t got time for games,” Eames said in his most deathly serious voice. Robert was glaring at the rapier, but to his credit he wasn’t shouting or panicking. It vaguely occurred to Eames that it was very likely that Robert had either been in such a situation before, or had been trained in preparation for being taken hostage someday. That thought was a bit sad, but it did make Eames’s life much easier given the circumstances.

“Where is my fiancé?” Robert asked, finally looking back at Eames. Eames’s eyes narrowed immediately, and he crossed his arms over his chest in a way that very clearly said, _I know that I have quite impressive biceps, and I am going to make sure that you think about what they might do to you_.

“You mean my husband,” he replied, his voice a dangerous purr. He bent down to get a little bit closer to Robert’s eye level. “But I was about to ask you the same question.”

Robert’s whole expression changed at that, but not to one of hostility or anger; rather, his face went through several stages of confusion and surprise, and then he glanced down and noticed the silver ring still on Eames’s hand. He must have seen Arthur’s at some point, because his gaze immediately moved back to Eames’s face, and it was as though he were looking at him for the first time, and with a great deal of curiosity. “You’re Eames?” he said, and then he narrowed his eyes. “You’re not dead?”

“Surprisingly enough, not yet.”

“That’s _wonderful_ ,” Robert exclaimed, and it was rather the last thing Eames expected to hear from him. Robert was even smiling, and he did not at all look like a man who smiled very often. In that moment, Eames suddenly realized that he was dealing with a man who actually cared about Arthur. Arthur had called Robert his friend, but Eames hadn’t realized that he’d really meant _friend_ as in “someone who would be happy for Arthur’s hypothetical happiness” as opposed to simply “not lover”. “Does Arthur know?”

Eames only blinked at him for a moment, but recovered from the shock admirably. “Being as I saved him from the man who was hired to kidnap him, only to be arrested and thrown into prison for the trouble, yes, he knows. Now, I really don’t have the time to discuss the matter at any greater length as Arthur is currently in significant danger, so if you do indeed care about his wellbeing in any regard, you will tell me what you know concerning his whereabouts.”

“Nothing!” Robert exclaimed. “Why would I come up to his room without guards or weapons if I wasn’t expecting him to be the one in them? I’ve only just returned with the party I led to search for him. Who is he in danger from? I’ll go find him if you’ll tell me and put the sword down.”

Robert was the sort of person who was incredibly easy to read; he was telling the truth and genuinely concerned, and Eames knew it. Which was, on the one hand, somewhat comforting but also, on the other hand, frustrating. “No,” he said, “I’m going.”

“You can’t just wander around the castle; you’ll be arrested,” Robert said quite logically. “I won’t be. I should go.”

“You’re staying here.”

“Why don’t we have both?” Yusuf interjected, and when Eames looked over, he was opening a bottle from his seemingly inexhaustible supply. He pocketed the stopper, then moved over to Robert and without warning plucked a hair from his head (“Hey, you could have asked!”) and dropped it into the bottle. It dissolved, and the bottle turned from light green to blood red.

“Drink it,” Yusuf said, holding it out to Eames. There was certainly something unnerving about having a near-complete stranger thrust a phial of unknown substance in one’s face with orders to consume it, and Yusuf seemed to understand the moment of hesitation Eames underwent then, because he immediately produced a spoon from his pocket, poured a measure of the liquid into it, handed the bottle to Eames, turned, grabbed Robert’s face and squished his cheeks together so that he could pop the spoon into his mouth, and then closed his jaw for him. The look on Robert’s face would have been comically affronted if anyone were in the mood to be amused. The efficiency with which Yusuf worked would have been impressive if anyone were in the mood to be impressed.

“There. It’s not poison, see? Not that I would have a reason to poison you anyway after I’ve gone through all the trouble of saving you and am currently standing for your exclusive benefit in possibly the most dangerous place in the kingdom for the likes of me. _Drink it_ ,” he ordered, and Eames did.

Fifteen seconds and a transformation that was entirely painless but nearly made him physically ill later, Eames _was_ Robert, son of Maurice, of the House Fischer, or at least he was on the outside, which was all that was strictly necessary. “You’re a magician, Yusuf,” he said as he peered into the mirror.

“Alchemist,” Yusuf sniffed; he considered it to be more of a science, but he did not like debating that point.

“Right, yes. I’ll be back.”

“Before it wears off.”

“And when will that be?”

“I’m not sure; it depends on your metabolism.” Eames stopped and stared at Yusuf, one eye narrowing. Yusuf spread his arms as though to absolve himself of responsibility. “If you hurry it won’t matter!”

And there was nothing to be done for it, but it was fortunate that Eames had stopped, because over Yusuf’s shoulder he noticed something that he hadn’t seen before. One of the heavy tapestries on the wall was folded under along one side, and when Eames pushed past to get a better look he found behind it a door that was not quite latched, as though it had been closed in a hurry. The hallway behind it was narrow and poorly lit, obviously a servants’ passage. Eames couldn’t possibly know what had happened to Arthur or where he’d gone, but this way seemed more promising, and so he simply made his choice and hurried off down the stairs.

“Must you keep pointing that at me?” Robert asked after he’d watched Eames go with an odd mixture of fascination and disgust written on his features. He was staring at Ariadne’s rapier, which she was having no trouble at all keeping leveled at him because it wasn’t real and weighed nothing.

“I have to admit,” she said, “this isn’t very comfortable.” So she moved a couple of feet to the right and sat down on the bed. The sword stayed.

Within minutes, Eames wasn’t quite sure where in the castle he was. The back corridors were a maze of passages and stairways, and the castle was very old and had been added to in bits and pieces over time, resulting in a rather chaotic sort of layout. Eames only ran into a couple of young women, one carrying a basket of linens and the other a covered tray of food. Both looked quite surprised to see the prince in the back halls and scrambled to curtsy to him, but Eames was in too much of a hurry to attempt to act normal.

“Have you seen my fiancé?” he’d blurted out to both of them, knowing that he sounded out of breath and frazzled and not really quite like the prince but not caring. Both girls had been very apologetic but hadn’t seen him, though of course it wasn’t as though they’d been hanging about in one spot, either. It was as Eames began to wonder what, exactly, he might accomplish by searching on his own and whether he should perhaps change tactics that he felt himself grabbed from behind and dragged through a doorway into what turned out to be a storage closet full of musty old crates and a few brooms and feather dusters.

There was a small grated window in the door, and it let in just enough of the torchlight from the hall that Eames could see that the person who’d grabbed him was Arthur. There was such a relief that washed through him that he was afraid his knees might give out. “Arthur! I can’t—”

“Shut your mouth, Robert,” Arthur hissed, and his dangerous tone would have silenced most men regardless of the actual words spoken. “I am not angry with you, but I am extremely angry that the head of the royal council is attempting to murder me in order to start a war with Brythonia and that he’s thrown my husband in prison, who is alive, by the way, and I am very sorry that you’re going to have to find someone else to marry, but at this point I have been through _far_ more than I signed on for and I do not have time for you to argue with me or be surprised that Browning had me kidnapped, because I am telling you it happened, and you are going to believe me, and _you are going to help me fix this or so help me, Robert, I will take you down with me_.”

Eames was stunned, and he knew the fact that he was stunned was quite visible in his expression, and so he was probably doing a fairly convincing job of imitating Robert. But he did not want to imitate Robert, and so once he recovered he said, in his own accent and with his own cadence even though his vocal cords had changed and he still sounded somewhat different, “Darling, I hope no one else has told you that you’re absolutely breathtaking when you’re angry.”

And now it was Arthur’s turn to look stunned. He actually leaned in a little to get a better look at him, and then only appeared all the more confused for it, especially when he looked down and seemed to realize that the person he’d thought was Robert was wearing Eames’s clothes, which were somewhat too big for him in his present state. “ _Eames_?”

“In the flesh; just temporarily someone else’s. Yusuf is really quite talented.”

Eames expected some sort of exclamation or other expression of surprise, but instead he suddenly found himself pressed up against the wall of the small closet with Arthur’s tongue in his mouth, hands in his hair and on his neck and gripping his shirt. “You’re all right,” Arthur breathed against his lips between kisses. “You’re all right. I was so worried.” He pulled away just a bit, and his eyes focused on Eames’s face, and he went through an odd little dance where he drew back, and then stopped, and then pulled Eames closer, and then seemed to decide against that as well. “This is so weird. I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re…”

And then, all at one, Arthur kissed him again, hard and brief, and held him tight, and it really was nearly impossible for Eames to keep up with his changing whims. “You’re going to change back, aren’t you?” Arthur asked.

“According to Yusuf,” Eames whispered, unable to keep the amusement out of his voice. “Though really, the prince isn’t exactly repulsive, you know.”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t look at other people,” Arthur said, and it was such an absurd lie and yet he said it with such genuine conviction that it nearly broke Eames’s heart.

“Listen, darling, we have to get out of here,” he said. “Do you remember the way back to your room?”

“Maybe,” Arthur replied. And then he went silent, and Eames raised his eyebrows, waiting for him to clarify. Arthur frowned. “I don’t know! Maybe! I didn’t design this maze!”

Eames sighed, and said, “I’m sure we’ll find it eventually.” But as it turned out, they did not, or at least not just then. Not twenty seconds or even one hundred feet from the closet, Arthur was grabbed, his hand yanked free of Eames’s grip before there was even a sound aside from Arthur swearing, and when Eames turned, there was Browning, with two palace guards who were currently manhandling Arthur into submission.

“You have to be joking,” Arthur sighed, sounding more frustrated than frightened by this point.

“No one seems to be laughing,” Browning replied. “Arthur Addinell, you are under arrest for aiding and abetting in the escape of a known criminal. And after I warned you to behave.”

So, Eames’s absence had been discovered. He did his best not to get angry. To act confused. To do what Robert would do, or at least what a man such as Browning would presume that a man such as Robert would do. “What are you talking about? Arthur has been with me, and I—”

Browning didn’t even acknowledge him; he just nodded in the direction of the guards and said, “Lock him up. I’ll deal with him later.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Arthur insisted, and the look he gave Eames was as stern as his voice. “I’ll be fine.” He glanced briefly and significantly in Browning’s direction. 

Eames couldn’t believe that this was happening. Here he was, watching Arthur being dragged off to the prison he’d only just escaped from. His instinct was to attempt to get a weapon off of Browning or one of the guards and take all three of them, but he could see what Arthur was doing, and that was evening the odds, and so he let him. “I’ll get you out,” he called after him.

“Don’t make promises you won’t want to keep. Come, Robert. I think we need to have a chat with your father about your engagement.”

Browning, Eames noticed, sounded genuinely frustrated. His teeth were gritted as he spoke, his brow seemingly permanently furrowed. Apparently this really was not what he’d been aiming for. Eames narrowed his eyes, and let himself lag behind Browning, and waited for the perfect moment.

Arthur did not have a plan; all he knew was that he hadn’t liked Eames’s chances against two armed guards and Browning, and if he could split them up, it would be better. He was marched, his hands shackled in front of him, out of the castle and into the yard. It was getting late, and the grounds were dark and quiet now that most of the castle staff had settled in for the evening.

There was no sign of anyone else at all, in fact, until without warning came the rather sickening sound of something very hard hitting something rather fragile, and the guard to Arthur’s left collapsed to the ground with a pained sound. It took a moment for Arthur – and the other guard – to realize what had happened, which was that he’d been hit in the face with a rock.

Only then did Arthur notice Ariadne crouched beside one of the small sheds that bordered the orchard and gardens. She made eye contact with him, lifted her hand slowly, and launched a second stone just as Arthur ducked. The second guard went down nearly on top of Arthur, but he managed to roll out of the way, and he lay there on his back, breathing heavily for a moment as he waited to find out if either of them were going to try to get back up and assuming that it would simply be better to stay out of the way if they did.

“That was impressive,” he said as Ariadne appeared over him instead.

“I have very good aim,” she said, and she smiled at him. “And you are absolutely terrible at not being captured.”

“I’m beginning to think it’s a curse.” Arthur didn’t bother to sit up. His hands were bound, and he was finding that he liked it here on his back, staring up at the trees and the sky and Ariadne as she went and knelt over the guards. On the ground, of no use to anyone, he could pretend for a minute that he didn’t have to worry about anything.

He listened as Ariadne retrieved the keys from one of the guards’ belt, and he held up his hands so she could unshackle them. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “What are you doing out here?”

“Looking for the stables. We’re never going to escape on foot,” she said, and she offered him a hand. He took it, and she hauled him up with surprising strength for her small frame. As they made their way along the side of the main keep toward the stables at the other side of the yard she commented, “I take it from your presence out here that your gentleman didn’t manage to find you.”

“No, he did. He’s with Lord Browning, who thinks he’s Robert, and I just hope that the real one isn’t around to ruin the illusion.”

“You’re both terrible at not being captured,” Ariadne said with some degree of awe at their skill at getting into bad situations. She didn’t even know the half of it, he thought grimly. “But Yusuf has the real prince, and he won’t be going anywhere.”

“Eames has been gone for a while,” Robert was saying not so terribly far away but significantly higher up.

“Yes,” Yusuf agreed from where he was stretched out on Arthur’s bed, flipping through one of the books he’d found on the nightstand. His style of guarding was far less directly threatening than Ariadne’s. He’d tied just one of Robert’s legs to his chair, which was a rather substantial wingback one.

“Firstly, I do care about Arthur, and I’ve been working under the impression that I therefore have a vested interest in not leaving this room. Also, I can untie this,” Robert had said, indicating the binding with his conspicuously free hands.

Yusuf had just stared at him and said, “I would notice and stop you, obviously. I don’t need to make sure you don’t move; I only need to make sure you don’t move quickly enough to get away.”

“You’re a practical man,” Robert had told him then. Now he said, “Should we be worried?”

Yusuf glanced up from the book, which was an architectural treatise on the funerary monuments of the disproportionately wealthy. Arthur, it seemed, was a man of esoteric and macabre interests. Yusuf considered Robert for a moment, then closed the book.

“Worrying isn’t productive. If you’re going to rule this kingdom someday – and someday soon, if what I hear of your father’s health is accurate – you’re going to have to stop it. Worrying is a form of procrastination; it’s a leader’s job to make decisions. If the decision is right, you’ve done your job. If it’s wrong, you accept responsibility and fix it. Farmers worry about the harvest. Parents worry about feeding their children. You make decisions that will ensure that your people’s worries are unnecessary. That’s the only way to succeed.”

Robert quirked one eyebrow, and he was silent long enough that it was clear he was thinking on Yusuf’s words quite intently. At last he said, “You’re saying I should be making a decision right now?”

“No,” Yusuf replied. “Right now all of the decisions have been made for you.”

“Ah.”

“Start making decisions when we’ve left.” He opened the book to go back to it, but then had another thought, and he closed it once more and sat up. “You should know that I’m not actually an associate of Mr. Eames. I’m one of the people who kidnapped your erstwhile fiancé, actually. The man who recruited me to help do so was hired by someone close to the royal family. I have been informed by said fiancé that this someone is, in fact, Lord Browning, and that when the kidnapping failed, he brought Arthur back here with the intent of instead having him killed on your wedding day in order to instigate a war with Brythonia.”

Robert had the look of a man who very sincerely wanted to disbelieve what he was hearing but couldn’t quite. Yusuf was very familiar with such expressions; he had spent some time as a highwayman and had seen it often on the faces of people who had just been informed that all of their worldly possessions were about to be confiscated in an orderly fashion. “Why would he do that?”

Yusuf cocked his head in thought for a moment, then offered, “I don’t know, but your father’s health is declining, and you’re about to become king but won’t yet have solidified your influence or support. This is just speculation, but it seems as though war in a period of instability would allow those who already have established positions of power to attempt to wrest more of it.”

Robert was clearly as impressed as he was disturbed by the idea itself; perhaps even a bit more impressed than disturbed. “And you just came up with that theory? Off the top of your head?”

“I’ve spent a lot of time around terrible people. I know how their minds work.”

“Have you ever considered a career in political advising?”

“I’ve found myself reforming, but I’m still a bit of a terrible person. I’m also extremely susceptible to bribes.”

“Well. Thank you for your honesty.”

“You know, no one’s ever said that to me before.”

Just then, the same back door that Eames had left through swung open, and a body was thrown through the tapestry covering it. It was Browning, hands bound behind him but unconscious and very bruised up, and he fell to the floor with a rather sickening sort of thud. “Speaking of,” Yusuf said, standing up and straightening his clothes. Robert was shocked, but Yusuf acted as though this sort of thing happened around him all the time.

Eames followed Browning, back in his own shape and huffing, presumably with the effort of subduing Browning and hauling him upstairs. “This place is bloody impossible to navigate,” he complained. “I’d like to get out of here and break Arthur out of prison as soon as possible, if it’s all the same to you.” He gestured to the window he and Yusuf had come in through. He didn’t even acknowledge Robert, though perhaps this was understandable from a man whose husband had recently been only eight hours from marrying him.

“Right,” Yusuf said, and went into his bandolier and his seemingly endless supply of bottles, and produced a phial that he tossed to Robert. “A few drops of that in someone’s food or drink will get the truth with a bit of prompting. A spoonful will get truths that you don’t want to know - ones that will keep you awake at night – with no prompting at all and against any protest.”

“Oh. Wow,” Robert said flatly, staring at the phial. He tucked it away and looked to Yusuf, and then to Eames, and added with significantly more feeling as he reached down to untie his artfully minimal binding, “Let me come with you; I can secure Arthur’s release, or at the very least help force it.”

“It appears that that won’t be necessary,” Yusuf said, peering out the window. “Ariadne seems to have him. And also horses. How resourceful.”

No sooner had Yusuf finished speaking than Eames was pushing past him and climbing straight out the window. “I am never letting that boy out of my sight again,” he muttered as he disappeared over the ledge.

Robert came to the window as Yusuf swung his own legs over, and Yusuf paused just long enough to tell him, “Good luck with those decisions.”

“Thank you,” Robert said as Yusuf followed Eames. He watched as a few seconds later Eames appeared in the yard below and swung himself up onto Arthur’s horse behind him. There were enough for him to have his own, but from the way he wrapped his arms around Arthur’s waist, it was fairly obvious that he’d become a bit paranoid about losing him. Arthur waved up at him, and Robert smiled slightly and gave a little wave back.

“I have to run,” Arthur called up to him.

“I’m sorry about almost getting you killed,” Robert called back, but Arthur only shrugged.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll write to you.” Arthur smiled at him then – really, fully smiled – for the first and only time, gave his reins a little tug, and rode out of Robert’s life as abruptly as Robert had ridden into his. And as it turned out, Arthur did write to Robert when he reached Proclus and was accepted into the university there, telling him about his studies and the balmy weather in the lands across the Impossibly Deep Sea. Robert wrote back, telling Arthur about his father’s passing and Browning’s exile after a shocking outburst at a state dinner, and about how he’d been spending nearly all of his free time helping the surprisingly handsome stable boy train up replacements for his best horses, which had mysteriously vanished.

But that was some time later. Before that came a pirate ship bound for the main port of Proclus, where Yusuf would hand-pick a new crew and become the Dread Pirate Charles, and Ariadne would become his first mate, and Arthur and Eames would stay safely on land for a good, long while. Before that came Eames, pulling Arthur down into his bed on his last voyage as captain.

“This is nice, you being my cabin boy after I spent so long as your farm boy,” Eames said, his voice a low rumble as Arthur climbed onto him.

“You were never my farm boy.”

“That’s what you thought, darling, but I was always yours.”

“Do you have to be so sappy?” Arthur asked, but his dimples were betraying him.

“I do. Absolutely,” Eames replied as he reached up and under the collar of Arthur’s shirt, finding the clasp of the chain he wore around his neck and undoing it. He slid Arthur’s ring off of it and dropped the chain carelessly onto the floor, and he took Arthur’s hand and kissed his palm softly before sliding the ring back where it belonged.

“Won’t the crew notice that you and your cabin boy match?” Arthur protested, though he put up absolutely no physical resistance.

“I’ll wear gloves. You’ll wear gloves. I’ll order the entire crew to wear gloves,” Eames suggested as he took both Arthur’s hands in his own, twining their fingers together, relishing the feel of that little band of silver and Arthur’s soft, unscarred academic’s hands clasped in his own.

“Or I could just bandage my left hand,” Arthur countered, though the last word was nearly swallowed as he kissed Eames, pushing his arms up to pin them over his head and give himself room to get closer, his hands sliding down to run appreciatively over the smooth undersides of Eames’s exposed forearms. Eames arched up as Arthur stretched out atop him, and Arthur shifted, taking hold of Eames’s head and tracing his ears with his thumbs as he sucked Eames’s bottom lip, biting down until he left it swollen.

“I think I know which parts of me you missed most,” Eames joked, looking up at Arthur with a little smile and heavily lidded eyes.

“Certainly not your voice,” Arthur said as he sat up and pushed up Eames’s shirt. Eames wriggled out of it with Arthur’s help, though he was left to finish on his own as Arthur suddenly stopped in favor of running his hand over Eames’s chest and left shoulder. “What’s this?” Arthur asked, trailing his fingertips along the tattoo that curled along Eames’s collarbone. It was a flight feather, long and elegant and somehow soft-looking even in its simple black rendering.

“Oh, um. You know how things are, when you’re in an environment where everyone around you is doing something…”

Arthur noticed the calamus of the feather only then, sharpened, the tip of it stained black with ink. It was a quill. He froze, his eyes going wide, and he was dimly aware of Eames watching his expression intently. “I always loved it,” Eames said after a moment, “how you would pretend you were just ignoring me when I came to your window, but you’d sit there and let your ink bleed all over your page. How much work did I ruin by coming to bother you every day?”

A second later, Arthur was climbing off of Eames and tearing at the laces of his breeches so he could yank them down. “None. I was always writing gibberish when you came. I couldn’t think with you around.”

“God, Arthur,” Eames breathed, as much at that revelation as at Arthur’s sudden urgency. He let Arthur strip him, then sat up and grabbed hold of Arthur’s clothing, peeling him out of it as quickly as he could. Where Eames had only gained muscle in the last year, Arthur was thinner now, and Eames knew without having to ask that it was from lack of appetite. “Oh, darling, look at you. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, but tomorrow you’re eating an entire cake,” he said as Arthur stretched out atop him once more.

“I’m sure the crew will love the use of limited stores.”

“When we make land, you’re eating an entire cake.”

“I appreciate the concern.”

Eames spread his legs, letting Arthur slide down between them, and wrapped them around his waist. All he had to do was angle his hips up invitingly and Arthur’s eyes went wide, his tongue darting out to wet his lips. “Tell me you have something,” he said, his voice choked.

Without looking, Eames reached up above himself, under his pillow, and came back with a small bottle of what looked to be olive oil. “I’m sure the crew will love the use of limited stores,” he purred.

“Fuck the crew,” Arthur said, sitting up on his knees and grabbing the bottle impatiently.

“They’ll have to get in line.”

Arthur opened Eames up with his other hand on Eames’s erection, stroking him in time with each press of his fingers and watching rapt as Eames arched and writhed in front of him. “I hope you know that no one has touched me since the day you left,” Arthur breathed raggedly as the tip of Eames’s cock began to leak and coat his fingers with each pass. “I haven’t even touched myself since the day I heard that you’d died.”

A rough moan was torn from Eames’s throat by that, followed by a desperate, “Now. Now, Arthur. You’ve waited more than long enough,” and that got a slightly hysterical little laugh out of Arthur, who seemed to agree. He pushed Eames’s legs up, bent him practically in half. He positioned himself frantically and when he pushed in, Eames thought for one overwhelming moment that he might climax just from the feel of Arthur inside him.

“When we get to Proclus, I want to be boring,” Arthur said lowly, and it was perhaps the strangest thing he could have said at a time like this, and yet it was exactly what Eames wanted to hear right then.

“Yes,” he moaned as Arthur drew back and pushed into him, the discomfort he was feeling dissipating by the moment when Arthur began to move.

“No consorting with pirates.” Arthur thrust harder, and Eames arched up helplessly.

“And no royalty. No excitement.”

“Yes,” Arthur breathed. “Just a simple apartment. And the softest mattress money can buy.”

“That is quite literally everything I could ask for,” Eames replied, and Arthur hooked Eames’s knees with his elbows and leaned in to kiss him fiercely as he drove hard into him. After that there were no more words; just heavy, mingling breaths and little gasps and muffled moans and the rhythmic, delicious slap of skin on skin. It didn’t last long; neither of them was capable of holding on, and it didn’t matter. There would be a thousand other chances to draw it out. Arthur came buried deep inside Eames, nails digging hard into his thighs; when he’d pulled out, trembling, he took Eames’s cock in his mouth and sucked him deep and swallowed him down while Eames bit down on his own hand in a desperate bid not to be overheard outside the cabin.

There was indeed very little excitement for them when they arrived in Proclus, for years afterward, just as they’d wanted. Neither of them minded in the slightest; in fact, it was even better than they could’ve anticipated. They discovered for themselves what they’d suspected all along: that true love has nothing to do with danger or intrigue or great tales. It might inspire one person to cross hill and vale and sea to save the other, but it also might inspire one person to cross the kitchen upon arriving home to wrap their arms around the other and press soft kisses to their neck while they prepare dinner. Who’s to say one is more meaningful or more significant than the other when both of them are born of precisely the same emotion? True love takes root in the crevices in a person’s being, a creeping thing that breaks two people apart and knits those pieces together again to make something stronger than the sum of its parts. And after it blooms, it is not nourished and sustained by blood or tears or hardship any more than by every point of contact, every interaction, every whisper or shared moment or lazy day spent together in bed.

And really, that’s the most important thing.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was based on a roleplay I wrote with my wife, Harl, a couple of years ago. It was heavily amended, revised, and otherwise changed, but some of her original phrasing and descriptions survive at times, and she deserves a great deal of credit.


End file.
